Dr ALISON BLEANEY
Be aware that the Tasmanian Government is using the national drinking water health vaue of 40 ppb (put up from 20 ppb in 2004 by our national regulator) to protest to the public that our drinking water is safe, despite the initial groundwater sampling project finding atrazine at 1.5 and 1.2 ppb along with other pesticides and BPA, and atrazine and simazine found in raw surface drinking waters.
The Australian Drinking Water Guidelines states that atrazine should not be in drinking water.
The APVMA have repeatedly stated that atrazine contamination is not a real issue as most Australians do not drink groundwater and only drink from protected water catchments; this is obviously incorrect for the whole of Tasmania (and most of Australia).
PANUPS 27 August 2009
Atrazine controversy heats up
In the last week, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Washington Post and Peoria Journal Star have all run features covering an emerging scandal around atrazine contamination in the U.S. water supply. Atrazine is a widely used herbicide that was banned by the EU in 2004. Around that time, Syngenta (atrazine’s manufacturer) held over 50 private meetings with U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulators who were then reconsidering atrazine’s registration. Independent scientists and health advocates enjoyed considerably less access to decision-makers, and no peer-review access to the Syngenta-sponsored science that informed EPA’s ruling. Since then, a growing body of research has linked atrazine with birth defects, low birth weights (see below) and certain forms of cancer.
Epidemiological studies indicate that very low level fetal exposure at key periods (via a pregnant woman drinking water contaminated well below the legal limit) may interrupt critical developmental processes, resulting in skull and facial malformations and misshapen limbs.
WhatsOnMyFood? finds atrazine in 70% of U.S. drinking water – and the highest levels of contamination are in the Midwest where it is widely used on corn fields. While local water systems are required to test for atrazine on no more than a quarterly basis, the EPA requires Syngenta to test weekly at 150 vulnerable watersheds.
The former generally find levels below the legal contamination limit of 3 parts per billion (ppb), but the latter, more frequent testing finds spikes to concentrations many times over the legal limit. For instance, residents in McClure, Ohio were told that their highest level of contamination in 2008 was 3.4 ppb, while hitherto undisclosed EPA/Syngenta results for June show atrazine contamination at 33.83 ppb — more than ten times the legal limit.
And,
“Safe” levels of atrazine in drinking water linked to low birth weight Underscoring the threat posed by the atrazine contamination discussed above is a study published earlier this month in Environmental Health Perspectives. Hugo Ochoa-Acuña and coworkers from Purdue University analyzed more than 24,000 Indiana birth records, calculating each mother’s to exposure to atrazine from drinking water based on her home address.
They found that the risk of having a low-birth-weight baby increased as atrazine levels in the mother’s tap water increased. Specifically, the prevalence of small-for-gestation-age births was 17-19% higher among women whose water had greater than 0.1 ppb atrazine during the third trimester versus women with less than 0.1 ppb atrazine in their water. An earlier study of Iowa births found a similar effect. Babies born small-for-gestation-age (defined as a birth weight lower than 90% of babies born at the same gestation age) have an increased risk of sickness and of dying within their first year. The EPA considers atrazine levels in drinking water to be safe as long as the yearly average level is lower than 3 ppb. “Scientists and health advocates have been saying for years that the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level for atrazine is too permissive, and this latest study just proves that point,” explains Pesticide Action Network staff scientist Karl Tupper.
