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EHHI Calls for Towns and Individuals to Reduce Their Use of Lawn and Tree Care Pesticides

Press Release

Feet

[March 27, 2001] After completing a study that determined that lawn and tree care pesticides were infiltrating private wells, EHHI is calling for towns and individuals to reduce their pesticide uses.

Pesticides for lawns and trees include insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, all of which have health implications. Many of these products are neurotoxins, that is, they affect the nervous system, and many of them are carcinogens. Exposures to such toxic chemicals should be kept to a minimum and should be used only when necessary.
Humans are exposed to pesticides in many ways. We inhale them, consume them through the food we eat, and we absorb them through our skin in a variety of activities, such as playing on fields, sitting on a recently treated lawns, or applying these products without using gloves. A study conducted by EHHI which looked at whether private drinking water wells were being contaminated by lawn and tree care chemicals found that these chemicals do in fact infiltrate wells, even deep wells.

As tobacco was in the 1950's, pesticides are advertised as perfectly safe. Tobacco was not perfectly safe then and pesticides are not perfectly safe now. Unlike tobacco, however, pesticides do have a beneficial role to play in society.

We must begin to understand the risks posed by pesticide use and weigh those risks against the benefits. It is important to know that many of the most heavily advertised products, such as fertilizers containing weed controls, do have pesticides in them and should be handled and applied with great care, if not avoided altogether.

Pesticides are tested for their health effects one compound at a time. There are no studies that look at the possible health effects of combinations of pesticides, and yet our exposures are more likely to be experienced that way. In our well water study, we found that in the majority of wells that were contaminated had more than one pesticide present. Indeed, one well, which happened to belong to a non-user of pesticides, contained five different pesticide compounds.

This finding pointed to the impossibility of controlling the purity of one's own drinking water in a community where the use of lawn and tree care pesticides was widespread. It also shows how important it is for whole communities to reduce their pesticide uses if we are to protect people's drinking water and protect the public's health.

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