Perils of the New Pesticides

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Two-and-a-half-year-old Amber Nickol McKeown had head lice. Her mother, Eileen, put the child in a warm bath and massaged Osco Lice Treatment Shampoo into her scalp. Problem solved.

But when Eileen lifted Amber from the tub, she noticed her daughter’s chest had turned red. She called her husband, James, upstairs, and the couple tried bathing Amber in cool water. The little girl’s condition deteriorated quickly. She labored to breathe. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her skin peeled off in clumps, according to a lawsuit filed by the family.

Amber was rushed from her home in Lester, Pennsylvania, to Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital, where the staff found burns over 60 percent of her body. She was in respiratory distress, and her heart and lungs couldn’t supply her body with oxygen.

On November 4, 2000, within 72 hours of her bath, Amber was dead. After performing an autopsy, the Delaware County (Pennsylvania) medical examiner concluded that the child’s death had been triggered by exposure to a type of pesticide called a pyrethrin and its accompanying impurities, according to the family’s lawsuit.

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Perils of the New Pesticides

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After years of fielding complaints about the ubiquitous weed-killer and water pollutant atrazine, the Environmental Protection Agency has decided to take a closer look at the product, used on corn and other crops, mainly in the Midwest. Some of those complaints are documented in a database produced by the Center in 2008 as part as of our Perils of the New Pesticides investigation.

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Perils of the New Pesticides

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Back in December, our story, Pets and Pesticides: Let’s Be Careful Out There, reported that an alarming number of deaths had been linked to spot-on pesticide products for pets. This afternoon, the Environmental Protection Agency agreed there was cause for concern. The agency announced that it would intensify its evaluation of these products “due to recent increases in the number of reported incidents.”

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Perils of the New Pesticides

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Last June Diane Bromenschenkel applied a flea-and-tick product to her English pointer, Wings, so the dog wouldn’t get ticks while hunting pheasant in the tall grasslands of western Idaho. Wings, a healthy five-year-old with a sleek white coat and a chocolate brown mask, enjoyed long walks in the woods, bacon treats, and burying things in the yard. But three months after the pesticide was applied, the animal was dead.

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Perils of the New Pesticides

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The European Parliament’s environment committee voted last week in favor of new pesticide regulations that make America’s laws look a little, well, wimpy. The European package cracks down on chemicals that pose a risk to human health or the environment, setting strict guidelines that could result in bans on a large number of common agricultural products — up to 10 percent of insecticides, 10 percent of herbicides, and 32 percent of fungicides, according to estimates from the U.K.’s Pesticide Safety Directorate. The committee vote serves as a recommendation to the whole parliament, which will consider the proposal in January.

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