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EHHI and Attorney General Blumenthal Urge Parents to Take Advantage of New School Pesticide Laws

Pesticides - Kids

[June 14, 2000] Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Environment and Human Health, Inc., are urging parents to learn about and use a new state law regulating use of pesticides in public schools and at day-care centers.

"We have some summer homework for school boards around the state: Protect your children against pesticides, as the new law requires," Blumenthal said.

"Our new law recognizes that pesticides consist of poisons - as toxic to humans as to bugs. If ingested in small amounts, they may be tolerable to humans, but they are never harmless or benign."

"One simple paramount truth about pesticides is that children are more affected by exposure to such chemicals because they are smaller and because their major organs such as the liver and kidneys are not mature, and still growing," Blumenthal said.

"This new law extends many protections to pesticide applications at schools and day care facilities, but informed and involved parents and school officials are key to enforcing and applying these safeguards," he said. "I hope they can be fully and immediately implemented by the start of the next school year."

Parents should be aware that they must notify their local school administration in order to receive advance notification of planned pesticide use, said Nancy Alderman, President of EHHI, a research and advocacy group whose statewide study led to enactment of the new school-pesticide law.

"With schools closing for the summer right now, this is a good time for parents to think about taking advantage of the law before school opens again in September," she said.

More broadly, Alderman hopes that the new law will increase public awareness about the potential hazards of pesticides and encourage school districts to reduce their use.

"If we are to be protective of human health, we must reduce our unnecessary pesticide exposures and use pesticides only as a last resort, not the first resort," she said.

John Wargo, Director of Yale University's Center for Children's Environmental Health and a member of EHHI's Board of Directors, emphasized the special concerns that surround children's exposure to pesticides because their bodies are still developing.

Effort Seeks September Implementation

With the new law going into effect on July 1, EHHI also is working to make certain that officials at school districts throughout the state become aware of the requirements.

The EHHI research study that led to enactment in 1999 of the new pesticide law (Public Act 99-165) found what Alderman called "alarming circumstances" surrounding pesticide use in public schools. One finding was that one-third of the school districts taking part in the study used pesticides in school buildings on a regular basis even when a pest problem had not been found.

The new law requires that only trained and licensed pesticide applicators rather than school personnel use pesticides. Its other requirements, in addition to parental and teacher notification upon request, include important new record-keeping procedures.

The issue of pesticide use in schools, Alderman said, has taken on increased urgency since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acted on June 8 to ban, by the end of 2001, most sales of the pesticide chlorpyrifos (commonly sold under the brand names Dursban and Lorsban). The EHHI study found that chlorpyrifos was among the pesticides used in Connecticut schools.

"Even without the use of Dursban, most of the pesticides used in schools are neurotoxins and some are suspected carcinogens," Alderman said. "Exposures to children, teachers, and especially pregnant teachers, needs to be kept at a minimum if we are to protect human health."


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