AL: Exactly. The autism rate at UC Davis' study showed that the autism rate increased, I think it was ten times, or what was it? Five or six times in a ten-year period, in the state of California. There's a direct link between ADHD, autism...many of these kinds of brain damaging pesticides result in these conditions, even pre-birth. I wanted to mention one other thing, if I may, and that is, in today's Santa Cruz Sentinel there is an article on the right hand side of the front page, about how the commercial crab season has been canceled again, or at least delayed because the crabs themselves have a potent neurotoxin called domoic acid.
And I think it's so interesting that the California Department of Fish and Game would cancel the season in order to protect the public from eating crab with a potent neurotoxin, and yet the Department of Pesticide Regulation will do nothing to stop these fumigants that are neurotoxins that affect children almost every school day.
DB: Also joining us is Mark Weller. He's Program Director for Californians for Pesticide Reform. You were part of this press conference today. Maybe you could put this into context in terms of this community, how dangerous this situation is, and if, in fact, it's not part of a larger problem.
MW: Sure. There were parents and teachers from Ohlone Elementary School there. I think, Ohlone Elementary is a really good way to kind of capsulize what's happening all over California. So, Ohlone Elementary is a school of 500 children, K through 5, 97% Latino, 96% sociologically disadvantaged, you know, by state standards. And teachers and parents there have been battling pesticides for decades.
In fact, in 1999 the civil rights lawsuit against the California Department of Pesticides included Ohlone parents of students there. And they charged the state with discriminatory regulations by allowing for disproportionate number of Latino children to be exposed to hazardous pesticides. Now this case was settled. It was still being challenged, however, in 2011, that's 12 years later. And ... the Department of Pesticide Regulation accepted no guilt. But they agreed to install a pesticide air monitor on the grounds of the Ohlone Elementary campus.
Now, so this has been going on ... the air monitoring testing since the very end of 2011. And the state sets the lifetime cancer risk, their regulatory target for air concentrations of 1,3-D or Telone that Dr. Lopez is talking about in the study. That's a standard that is 10 times more lenient than in Europe. So it allows for 10 times more before California considers the level dangerous. But we should be clear, the European Union has banned 1,3-D and chloropicrin, and in fact all the pesticides studied in the UCLA report, as well as six of the eight that are most used pesticides near Ohlone Elementary.
So what did the state find in the air monitoring testing? Well, in its first full year of testing in 2012 the level was 14 percent above the cancer risk level at that elementary school. And over the last three years, the average has been 93 percent of the state's cancer risk level. So it's just under the state regulatory goal.
But, if that's not enough to say "Enough already, with allowing our children to breathe this poisoned air." The UCLA study tells us that the state just under the risk level figure is, most surely, understated. Because it doesn't take into account the presence of other fumigants which combine with 1,3-D to magnify cancer risk. And indeed chloropicrin does that and indeed chloropicrin is applied in huge amounts at Ohlone Elementary School.
So the DPR [Department of Pesticide Regulation] is, right now, drafting a statewide policy about regulations for pesticide used near schools. And so they must consider this information, about the combined effects of pesticides, when making that policy. And if they can't ban ... if they don't ban this stuff like they have in Europe the least they can do is push this stuff as far away from school children as possible: a mile, at least, is what we've been calling for.
DB: And Mark Weller, let me ask you, we know that there's a lot of corporate money, a lot of lobbying money, the major corporations have a lot to say about whether these kids are going to continue to be poisoned. Could you talk about that part of this struggle?
MW: Well, look 1,3-D is manufactured by Dow, Dow AgroSciences. This is that toxic air fumigant that causes cancer and the state was so worried about it that it was banned in California, between 1990 and 1995. It was brought back by hard lobbying, and successful lobbying, extremely successful lobbying by Dow because it is now one of the most used pesticides in the state.
Yeah, these are big factors, big forces to deal with. And, you know, we have to get our state, we have to ... it's been captured by these companies. And so we need to take it back and say, "You've got to put the health of people, of children ahead of Dow's profits."
DB: Dr. Lopez, I'd love to hear more from you about what happens among the families that you work with, when they find out about this. When they know about this. Is there a sense of a growing resistance? We know that it's not easy to complain particularly if you happen to be undocumented. You may be being poisoned but if you speak up you may end up being poisoned, and then getting deported.
AL: Right. That's absolutely correct. Eighty-three percent of farm workers in Santa Cruz county are undocumented. Seventy-five percent statewide. So they tend not to say anything. And it's very depressing. I actually told one farmworker family that has children that go to Ohlone School. I told them, I said "Keep them home." If I were that parent I wouldn't allow them to go to school and be subjected to this. And I think there needs to be a ground swell statewide of protests at the state level insisting that the DPR [Department of Pesticide Regulation] does it job. It has a mandate to regulate pesticides. It's not doing its job. Why are we paying their salaries, with our tax dollars?
I think this is disgraceful, and in Santa Cruz county, the south county is mostly brown, and many, many farm workers. The north county is mostly anglo, or white. And in the north county we have these laws about crab fishing so that white people don't eat crab with neurotoxins. But it's perfectly okay to spray brown children with these awful neurotoxic chemicals. I think this kind of environmental racism. It's a civil rights issue, Dennis. I mean this is absolutely intolerable and unconscionable.
DB: And so Mark, what comes next on this battle? Where do you see this going? And how will you try and call more awareness to what's going on?
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