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Rat Poison Makers Have Their Way With EPA
Mike Magner's Column
12/9/2003
With killer names like Havoc, Enforcer and Warrior Chunks, it's no wonder that rat poisons are often the first choice of consumers trying to tackle a rodent problem.
That's just how the chemical industry wants it, and based on the way manufacturers have steamrolled a federal safety review of their products, that's exactly how they'll continue to have it.
Rat poisons, led by top-selling D-Con, play a key role in the $300-million-a-year rodent-control industry in the United States. The instinctive response of most Americans upon spotting a mouse is to run to the nearest hardware store and load up on poison pellets.
Unfortunately, chemical weapons don't discriminate in choosing victims. Thousands, if not millions, of children, pets and other "non-target" animals are poisoned each year by pesticides, and rat poisons are a leading culprit, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
Most vulnerable are predators that eat rats and mice, including eagles, hawks and some endangered mammals. Since most poisons don't kill immediately, but take hours or days to work, the landscape is scattered with rodent time bombs that go off in whatever ingests them.
When it came time for a periodic review of rodenticide safety a few years ago, scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began looking for data on the health and ecological impacts of these widely used chemicals.
Poison control centers report that about 20,000 children are sickened by rodenticides each year, a handful of them fatally. The American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals says its Animal Poison Control Center receives several hundred calls a month, especially during the summer, about pets poisoned by rat or mouse bait. Experts say a single packet of D-Con is capable of killing a 22-pound dog.
Meanwhile, EPA found that wildlife agencies in New York and California had recently completed some of the first studies of pesticide deaths among birds and other species. Their evidence showed that brodifacoum, the active ingredient in D-Con, was the second most common cause of animal poisonings (No. 1 was the insecticide diazinon). Among the confirmed deaths were golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, kit foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and bobcats.
Concerned about all the collateral damage, EPA staff proposed a number of ways to reduce exposure.
To help protect children, it suggested that bittering agents and dyes be added to rodenticides so kids would spit them out and parents could tell if they had been put in a little one's mouth.
To help prevent deaths to "non-target" animals, the staff recommended an end to over-the-counter sales of the most toxic rat poisons, so only licensed exterminators could use them. The OTC ban would include products containing brodifacoum, a powerful anticoagulant.
Rodenticide makers were livid and moved quickly to quash every EPA proposal. Using a D.C. lobbying firm that recently hired two top pesticide regulators from EPA, the industry convinced EPA it could not add bittering agents and dyes because they would make poisons less effective and create potential liabilities.
More significantly, an industry task force set up to work with EPA made sure the proposal to end over-the-counter sales never saw the light of day.
The OTC ban was included in a draft report on rodenticides completed by EPA in late 2000 but never made public. A copy was obtained by the Natural Resources News Service. But when the report was released for public comment earlier this year, there was no mention of the recommended ban.
Internal memos obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council show that industry objections, raised at a series of meetings over the past three years, prompted EPA to abandon its proposed OTC ban. Dozens of other changes were made in the EPA report as well, all minimizing the ecological impacts of rodenticides, the memos indicate.
The bottom line is that what should be an informed public debate about pesticide safety has become little more than an industry-controlled marketing campaign with EPA's sanction.
Few would argue against the need to control rats and mice, which are undisputed threats to public health. However, many pest-control experts say poisons should only be used as a last resort, after removing food sources, sealing access points and setting some traps.
"Generally you're not going to control a rodent problem just by spreading a lot of poison around," said Dave Pehling, an expert on rodent control for the Washington State University Extension Service. "But I'm sure that's the way a lot of people do it."
And exactly the way the industry wants to keep it.