Document text
Endocrine (i.e., hormone) disruptors (EDs) cause or are associated with some $175 billion in annual medical costs in Europe. Figures aren’t available for the U.S. but surely are similar in magnitude. Thirteen chronic medical conditions have strong scientific evidence for causation by endocrine-disrupting chemicals including autism, obesity, diabetes, I.Q. depression and intellectual disabilities in children, cancers, and male reproductive disorders. Greatest dollar costs come from neurological problems, including ADHD, and I.Q. depression associated with exposures to ED pesticides. Half of the known ED pesticides are used to kill fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and other insect pests. Humans and beneficial creatures alike are continuously exposed to these pesticides from conventional agricultural pesticide practices, railroad and roadside maintenance, and from vector control sprays of insecticides that can appear in our environments (irrigation water, ponds, backyards, roadside ditches, Bear Creek, etc.), wherever pests like mosquitoes have been treated. These chemicals often appear within our bodies. The public assumes that such chemicals are highly specific for target pests, and these pesticides have federal safety approvals. Sadly, such safety approvals are an erroneous assumption. No less than six of the Jackson County Vector Control mosquito insecticides are EDs. I make reference to the chemicals in Anvil, Deltamethrin, and four larvicides containing the chemical methoprene (Altosid). All of these chemicals are also extremely toxic to honey bees and other pollinators at the ppb levels, much like other neurologically based insecticides called neonicotinoids. For example, pyrethroids like Phenothrin used in Anvil are typically more toxic than the natural chemicals from flowers. When used improperly, pyrethroids can increase the risk of liver cancer in rats and mice, be poisonous to cats and dogs and be toxic to pollinators. As an ED, they stimulate multiplication of estrogen sensitive cancer cells (like glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp) and are also an antagonist of progesterone action (altering the body’s preparation for pregnancy). Deltamethrin is one of the newer generation pyrethroids that is chemically altered to be 1,000 times more potent than the chemicals in Anvil. Talent, Phoenix and Ashland are all nationally recognized “Bee Cities.” As such, this declaration means the local citizens and elected officials have assumed an obligation to raise awareness of the beneficial roles that pollinators play in sustaining three-quarters of the planet’s plant species, including one-third of our food crops, and to agree to provide pollinators with healthy habitats in which to survive and proliferate. It does not mean exposing pollinators to lethal concentrations of airborne insecticides that have a poor success rate — less than 1 percent — for reaching the target mosquito population. Mosquitoes everywhere are growing resistant to the repeated treatments by the pyrethroid products associated with Anvil. This strongly argues for their judicial and intermittent use only when required, perhaps to strike down a declared public health emergency, and to also use them with proper concentrations of the active ingredient. These are practices Rachel Carson warned us to do with selected chemicals such as DDT and other pesticides some 55 years ago in her book, "Silent Spring." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees that spraying adult mosquitoes with the ultra low volume procedure used by Vector Control is a highly inefficient control method and does not always reduce the incidence of West Nile Virus disease in humans. It suggests that treatments concentrate on larval stages of mosquitoes where more specific, effective and less toxic chemicals can be used. I would like to learn more about the Vector Control District's justifications for the use of these endocrine-disrupting adulticide mosquito control chemicals and Altosid, which kills developing mosquitoes. I would also encourage the district's budget committee to reallocate some existing money for the use of more specific biological mosquito larvicides such as Bti, provide more funding for public education on the importance of mosquito habitat abatement measures that are much more efficient means to eliminate mosquitoes, and ask that they adopt a policy to use more toxic mosquito adulticides only during a declared public health emergency. These are the kinds of management practices that have led to a successful Bti-based and habitat abatement of mosquito problems at the Oregon Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge. Parenthetically, CDC’s best estimate of the potential future range of the Zika-carrying mosquito, aedes aegypti, ends around Sacramento. Ray Seidler of Ashland is a retired Environmental Protection Agency research scientist .