Each year in the U.S., some 110,000 pesticide poisonings are reported by poison control centers, and 23,000 people visit emergency rooms for the same reason. And every year, about 20 people nationwide -- mostly children -- die from accidental pesticide poisoning.
Where once the primary public-health concern surrounding pesticides was the possibility of acute poisoning and the long-term potential for cancer, today's risk managers recognize that pesticides can also affect the nervous, endocrine, immune and reproductive systems, and that they pose heightened threats to infants, young children, the unborn, and other subpopulations that are especially susceptible to toxic pollutants.
Converting to 100 percent biointensive IPM by 2020, as Consumers Union recommends, will reduce the total public health risk from pesticides by at least 75 percent from today's levels.
Environment:
Most environmental risks and ecological damage from pesticide use result from toxic effects of pesticides on various living organisms. Studies have found insecticides are the most toxic class of pesticides, followed by herbicides, acaricides (mite killers) and fungicides.
Impacts on non-target organisms depend on how the pesticide degrades and moves through the hydrological cycle, the soil and food chains.
Adverse impacts on beneficial organisms tend to be greatest where several different pesticides, especially insecticides, are applied routinely.
Effectiveness:
It takes from two to five applications of pesticides today to accomplish what just one application accomplished in the early 1970s.
More than 500 insect pests, 270 weed species and 150 plant diseases are now resistant to one or more pesticides.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has banned some of the worst pesticides, but the agency currently approves about
10 new active ingredients for each one it takes off the market. The EPA's rulings in the 1970s ended 25 percent of insecticide applications then in use.
Since 1986, however, EPA's actions have reduced pesticide use by less than 1 percent..
Costs:
In 1995 U.S. pesticide sales totaled $10.4 billion, and amounted to 1.25 billion pounds of active ingredients. About 75 percent of those expenditures went for agricultural applications.
Efforts to regulate pesticides cost American industry and taxpayers well in excess of $1 billion a year. While the public-health benefits of pesticide regulation have been shrinking, costs have been rising and are expected to rise still further. A growing share of the cost of pesticide regulation, moreover, is borne by state governments.
Federal expenditures for research on pesticides or pest management in 1995 totaled some $255 million. Less than 13 percent of that (about $32 million) supported work that contributes to biointensive IPM. The pesticide industry, meanwhile, spent about twice that much in 1995 just on print advertising.
