A Case for Revisiting the Safety of Pesticides
The quality and quantity of the data about the risk posed to humans by individual pesticides vary considerably. Unlike obvious birth defects, most developmental effects cannot be seen at birth or even later in life. Instead, brain and nervous system disturbances are expressed in terms of how an individual behaves and functions, which can vary considerably from birth through adulthood. In this article I challenge the protective value of current pesticide risk assessment strategies in light of the vast numbers of pesticides on the market and the vast number of possible target tissues and end points that often differ depending upon timing of exposure. Using the insecticide chlorpyrifos as a model, I reinforce the need for a new approach to determine the safety of all pesticide classes. Because of the uncertainty that will continue to exist about the safety of pesticides, it is apparent that a new regulatory approach to protect human health is needed.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) estimated that 891 pesticide active ingredients were registered in 1997 (Aspelin and Grube 1999) and that 888 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients were used in the United States in 2001 (Kiely et al. 2004). Few of these chemicals are applied alone but rather are applied in formulations using different combinations of several pesticide active ingredients (MeisterPRO 2004).It is not uncommon for many classes of pesticides, such as insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides, to be used on the same crop (National Agricultural Statistics Service 2005). In the case of insecticides, an adjuvant is often added to the formulations to enhance the intensity of the lethal effect. In the case of herbicides, due to the increasing incidence of plant tolerance to a specific pesticide, some formulations now have as many as three active ingredients (MeisterPRO 2004). Each active ingredient has a specific mode of action for controlling a pest, and each active ingredient has its own possible side effects on the wildlife and humans exposed to it. It is impossible to determine the cumulative risk posed to wildlife and humans as the result of releasing vast amounts of pesticide mixtures into the environment.

The quality and quantity of the data about the risk posed to humans by individual pesticides vary considerably. In some instances there are numerous studies about the health effects of a particular pesticide in humans and laboratory animals, and for others there are very few. In general, the longer the active ingredient has been on the market, the greater the number of citations in the peer-reviewed literature. Data are sparse when linking pesticides with neurodevelopmental effects other than for the insecticides chlorpyrifos (CPF), parathion, and 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDT).

Unlike obvious structural defects, most neurodevelopmental effects cannot be seen at birth or even later in life. Instead, adverse effects on the nervous system are expressed in terms of how an individual behaves or functions. Behavior and function vary considerably from birth through adulthood. Functional deficits are not 'on' and 'off' conditions but instead range from inconsequential through very mild to very severe to totally debilitating. Consequently, it is difficult to quantify neurodevelopmental impairment. Some of the end points used in the laboratory to detect functional impairment of the brain and nervous system are measured at the gene, cell, biochemical, and/or physiologic levels and often require high-tech instrumentation to quantify. At the human level, a battery of tests is continuing to evolve to measure with increasing sensitivity psychomotor, psychologic, clinical, and psychiatric symptoms to better quantify functional impairment.

In this article I have two principal purposes in discussingthe inherent risks of using pesticides, the limitations of testing techniques, and the intrinsic incompleteness of all scientific evidence: a) to encourage the use of the open literature about the neurodevelopmental effects of all classes of pesticides when setting the criteria for determining their safety and b) to encourage a more rigorous regulatory approach to protect human and environmental health in the absence of complete scientific certainty. I begin by presenting unequivocal evidence of pesticide exposure to numerous classes of pesticides during development. This is followed by a section on human epidemiology where only weak data are available linking neurodevelopmental impairment with pesticides. Next, I present a case study of how CPF cryptically interferes with brain development one stage after another. This is followed with selected laboratory studies demonstrating that other insecticides as well as other pesticide classes target prenatal brain development similar to CPF and share similar and sometimes diverse impacts on the construction and function of the brain. As the data reveal, not only insecticides but other classes of pesticides, such as herbicides and fungicides, can also interfere with neurodevelopment. In the 'Discussion' I challenge the protective value of current pesticide risk assessment strategies in light of the vast numbers of pesticide products on the market with untold numbers of targets and mechanisms of action that can cause neurodevelopmental damage.