His research on water buffaloes stymied, Abou-Donia decided to look into the effect of leptophos on chickens instead.
Once again, he found that the nerve agent caused irreversible (and lethal) damage to the experimental animals. Less than two weeks after the experiment began, young chickens rapidly began to lose weight and feathers and had great difficulty standing upright. A loss of muscular coordination (known as ataxia) caused swift paralysis and death from respiratory failure. Like the buffaloes before them, the birds were suffocating because their lungs failed.
Even before Dr. Abou-Donia published his warning about leptophos, news of the spray’s destructive power had crossed the desks of EPA staff. Agency chemists Gunter Zweig and Donna Kuroda were particularly alarmed by what they had heard from Wendell Kilgore, a University of California professor who had been in Alexandria in 1972 and had learned about the plight of the water buffaloes and the obstruction of Dr. Abou-Donia’s work.
Kuroda had also spoken to Robert Metcalf, an internationally renowned entomologist from the University of Illinois, who told her to do everything she could to keep leptophos off America’s dinner table. Zweig then urged his senior colleagues to reject Velsicol’s application for spraying leptophos on lettuce and tomato crops.
Not long afterward, Ronald Baron, an EPA scientist working out of the primate and pesticide effects laboratory in Perrine, Florida, found leptophos “capable of inducing a delayed neurotoxic response,” a somewhat diplomatic way of saying leptophos kills after a few days of exposure.1
Despite the growing evidence being compiled by the world’s scientists, EPA’s political bosses were determined that Velsicol would get the chance to sell enough leptophos in the United States to cover the bulk of the country’s supply of lettuce and tomatoes. EPA regulators dismissed Baron’s discovery; injecting poison under the skin of chickens, as Baron had done, was not the same thing as feeding the poison to the birds. It was the dose that mattered, they reasoned, not the poison itself: senior EPA scientists were convinced the poison could be applied to food at low enough levels that it would not harm those who ate it.
And of course EPA scientists deferred to the authority of the Velsicol company itself, which naturally claimed that leptophos had been given a clean bill of health by the company’s researchers.
In fact, leptophos had not been tested by Velsicol scientists; the work had been contracted out to a company called Industrial Bio-Test, which, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, did the dirty work for chemical and pharmaceutical industries so they could get their products approved by the government.
So even though evidence was mounting that leptophos would likely do to people exactly what it had done to water buffaloes and chickens in Egypt, Velsicol insisted to the end that the EPA should approve leptophos, and the EPA agreed. By 1974, the agency was prepared to look on while millions of Americans ate lettuce sprayed with 10 parts per million of this neurotoxin, and tomatoes with 2 parts per million.
In fact, the dangers leptophos posed to people were evident in Velsicol’s own manufacturing plant at the Bayport industrial park, just thirty-five miles from downtown Houston. More than sixty workers making leptophos from 1973 to 1976 suffered horrible effects. Within only a few months of working with the solid, waxy substance, workers became confused; at least two were paralyzed.2
The evidence against leptophos was becoming irrefutable. Zweig and Kuroda, the EPA chemists who first sounded the alarm about the compound, sought the support of another EPA colleague, Howard Richardson, a medical doctor and noted government pathologist. Richardson examined the slides IBT had used in its experiments with chickens treated with leptophos, and he found the results “highly questionable and unreadable.”
That was August 27, 1974. Just a few days later, Richardson and his wife Mary, also a physician with the EPA, left for a month in Europe, where they learned that the European chemical industry and European governments had reached an understanding that under no circumstances would they allow an insecticide like leptophos to get into food. When the Richardsons returned to the United States convinced that leptophos was too dangerous to use safely, their stance added pressure within the EPA to revoke Velsicol’s license. When news of the suffering of the Houston workers finally leaked in early 1976, the compound’s toxic career in the United States was abruptly brought to an end.
When Velsicol appealed to keep leptophos on the market, a committee appointed by the EPA administrator declared that the compound “can lead to a progression of neurotoxic effects including central and peripheral neuropathy, ataxia, weakness, paralysis, and ultimately death.”3 This was, of course, music to the ears of Mohamed Abou-Donia, whose findings on the poisoned water buffaloes in Egypt had started the ball rolling. But as was true for the EPA’s Zweig, Kuroda, and Richardson, Dr. Abou-Donia did not make many friends in the chemical bureaucracy of Washington.
“Leptophos pushed me out of Egypt,” Dr. Abou-Donia told me. “I said to my American wife that if we stayed at the University of Alexandria, we would have to go on the take. So we left for the United States because I treasured my integrity, and because I really wanted to do good science. At Duke University I have done that. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that the United States and Egypt have this in common—both countries have the same chemical bosses. The people that did the bribing in Cairo and Alexandria are also the people that create all this terrible mess with the regulation of pesticides in Washington, D.C.”
When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, things only got worse, he said. “All the doors of EPA were shut on my face. EPA regulators said they no longer were interested in the delayed effects of nerve poisons. We desperately need to know more about these agricultural chemicals because they are used in such large quantities by so many people all over the world. You hear that a farmworker was poisoned by this or that organophosphate toxin—and that’s it. At Duke University we are completely cut off from farmworkers and the entire agriculture of North Carolina. The state university has its extension agents, but they don’t talk to us and we don’t talk to them. And you know that the only people who want me to get back on pesticides research are the chemical warfare people of the U.S. Army.”
Clearly, the fate of poisoned farmworkers has been considered far less urgent than guaranteeing profits for chemical companies; farmworkers, especially migrant workers, being at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, carry little ammunition to counter the powerful voices of industry lobbyists. There are few stories more illustrative of this power imbalance than the tale of the work carried out by the Owens brothers.
In the early 1970s, the National Science Foundation and EPA awarded a grant of $600,000 to study pesticide exposure among migrant farmworkers to Clarence B. Owens, a professor of agronomy at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Owens was an ideal scientist for the study: an academic who did not mind working with his hands or mingling with workers at the very lowest strata of society. An African American scholar with compassion for migrant workers, Owens decided in 1976 to become a migrant farmworker himself. He would join America’s untouchables, the ever-replaceable appendices to America’s giant chemical farms, who were little better off than serfs in nineteenth-century Russia.
“The people perish. They are accustomed to the process of perishing,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in his 1899 novel, Resurrection. “Customs and attitudes to life have appeared which accord with the process—the way children are allowed to die and women made to overwork, and the widespread undernourishment, especially of the aged. And this state of affairs has come about so gradually that the peasants themselves do not see the full horror of it, and do not raise their voices in complaint. For this reason, we, too, regard the situation as natural and proper.”
I don’t know if Owens knew Tolstoy’s work, but he clearly had similar concerns: he wanted to see with his own eyes how migrant farmworkers in America are also accustomed to the process of perishing as the
y work our land and harvest our food. He worked alongside the workers of the Lawrence and Adams crews (two small groups of migrants named after their crew leaders) as they moved from fields in central Florida to coastal and then central North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and New York’s upper Hudson River Valley.
Owens joined these workers so he could experience their exhaustion, hunger, and humiliation and observe what was happening to them as they worked in the midst of plants loaded with pesticides. As part of the research, Owens and his brother, Emiel, a professor of finance at the University of Houston, took blood samples from the workers. They also recorded what the workers ate, carefully watched their health, and studied their physiological and social behavior day and night for the entire 1976 harvest season as the Owens brothers and their fellow farmhands gathered corn, tomatoes, peaches, squash, cucumbers, gladiola flowers, potatoes, tobacco, and apples.
The resemblance of a picker’s day to that of an American slave could hardly have been lost on the African-American Owens. “When I arrived at the crew chief’s home at about four a.m., they were already up and the wife was making chicken sandwiches to sell in the fields,” he wrote. “At four-thirty, we loaded on the bus and headed toward the ‘ramp.’ The ramp is a place about a block square where workers assemble in the morning and growers and crew chiefs come to select work crews for the day’s harvest. We drove on and dust began to rise from the muck soils as we headed down the lane toward the cornfield. I looked out the window of the bus, as the sun was coming up, and could see nothing but sweet corn, miles and miles of it.”
As Owens and his crew unloaded from the bus, they noticed workers mounting “an awkward-looking machine.” This was the mule train, from which “pullers” must harvest a minimum of fifty-six ears of corn per minute—almost an ear per second. The puller walks between two rows, pulling three ears of corn in each hand and simultaneously pitching the six ears into a bin just above his head. For this they were paid about three dollars a day.
The pullers are usually wet within the first thirty minutes in the field, a result of heavy dew on the plants caused by the soil’s high water table. Combined with the almost colloidal dust particles, the dew leaves the worker’s clothing as wet and black as the soil. The wet particles penetrate the worker’s outer clothing and also make it difficult to clean undergarments after a day’s work as a puller.
Owens jumped right in, taking a position first as a lead puller, then—when the pace proved too fast—as a wing puller. The rows were six hundred feet long, but they seemed endless. “I began to understand the reason for beginning work so early in the morning,” Owens wrote. “The workers cannot tolerate the intense heat generated by the sun and the corn later in the day. Fine muck particles rise as the train moves along, covering workers with particles resembling coal dust. As we approached the end of the row some fifteen minutes was required for the train to turn around and get started again.”
Out on the wing, the fumes from the train’s engine added to the misery. It was then that Owens, looking off some 500 yards to the left, noticed the planes, “descending to the tassel level of the corn, spraying pesticides, protecting the corn against the earworm . . . I realized that at the pace we were moving we would be pulling the newly sprayed corn before nightfall,” he wrote.
By the end of the day, Owens crew had hand-packed some four thousand crates of corn. Each puller got 12 cents a crate, the packer 10 cents, the box maker 3 cents; the tractor driver, the rickrack worker, and the loader split up the balance. Pullers earned about $30 a day, the packers $25, and on down the line. “Usually about one-fourth of the daily wages were spent at the store for drinks, food, and other items for relaxation.”4
To Owens, the workers’ hardships seemed appalling. The labor camps were infested with crawling insects, mosquitoes, and flies. There was one toilet for every eight workers, and only two-thirds of them were indoors. More than half the labor camps were located within fifty yards of crops sprayed with parathion, guthion, lanate, and sevin.
Owens also knew that most of the migrant farmworkers were hungry most of the time. He found their diet was “grossly inadequate,” since the food they ate “approached the critical level of 50 percent of the recommended minimum daily caloric intake level.”
A man with the teeth of hunger in his belly at the same time he is harvesting crops sprayed with toxins is playing with fire, perhaps even death. The key human enzyme affected by exposure to nerve poisons is known as acetylcholinesterase. Neurotoxic pesticides inhibit the production of this neurotransmitter—and the levels of acetylcholinesterase in the man were taking dangerous dives, Owens noticed, especially when the worker was not eating well. Some 80 percent of the workers developed severe skin rashes; two dozen required medical attention. A worker caught tuberculosis. A child died. A man died. At the Pennsylvania farm where the man died, a helicopter had applied three gallons of the nerve toxins parathion and guthion per acre, 12 times the recommended rate.
The early warning signs of acute or chronic pesticide poisoning are no more distinctive than a headache or dizziness. Unless farmworkers are “down and out,” they are not likely to pay attention to a headache or a “wheezy stomach.” Poor working people don’t stop working “unless they are taken out of a field desperately ill.”
The implication of this finding alone is frightening. Pesticides cripple and kill. They are also responsible for subtle and not so subtle changes in human behavior. A migrant farmworker at the end of a harvest season is not the same person he was when he started his migration. He has been subjected to a variety of “body insults” such as spray poisoning, a bad diet, and very bad living conditions.
Fifty-six percent of the farmworkers had “abnormal kidney and liver functions: 78 percent had severe chronic skin rash; and 54 percent abnormalities in chest cavities,” Owens reported. “Migrant workers are young workers, i.e., mean age of 25 years, but their health statistics resemble those of middle-aged Americans.”5
Owens’s research has broad implications. Hundreds of thousands of American- and foreign-born laborers suffer the rigors of working on pesticide-laden farms. The Owens brothers must have known their findings would be considered adversarial by the very government that was funding them. Indeed, they spent considerable time between 1974 and 1982 begging the EPA and the National Science Foundation for further research support. But the National Science Foundation dropped the Owenses in 1977, and the next year, the EPA granted them less than $10,000. That would be their last check from the EPA.6
The EPA was apparently uninterested in the Owenses’ concern that farm sprays caused debilitating sickness to the migrants laboring in the midst of poison-drenched vegetables and other crops. A senior EPA scientist and manager told the Owens brothers that more EPA money might become available as long as they offered “no attempt to draw ‘cause-effect’ correlations” between pesticides and health effects.
“I then told the ‘Bros.’ that once EPA had this report, we would seriously review . . . any proposal they put together for the support of further analytical work (not that we would fund it, but that we would consider it),” the EPA official wrote.7
Yet the Owenses’ study, “The Extent of Exposure of Migrant Workers to Pesticides and Pesticide Residues,” submitted both under the Carter administration in May 1978 and under the Reagan administration in May 1982, clearly showed the connection between toxic sprays and sickness among farmhands.
There were other reasons why the EPA dismissed the work of the Owens brothers. In the late 1970s, the agency was agonizing over another study done at Colorado State University, in which scientists studied the long-term effects of acute poisoning by the same nerve poisons that had so damaged the migrants in the Owens study. In this case, researchers examined not just farmers and nursery workers but people who worked in pesticide-formulating plants, aircraft spray pilots, even an agricultural chemicals salesman.
In their May 1980 report to the EPA, the scientists concluded that people e
xposed to acute poisoning with organophosphate pesticides—even just once in their entire lives—had experienced neurological problems, damage to fine motor and language functioning, and reduced memory and cognitive, intellectual, and perceptual function. Fully a quarter of the one hundred subjects suffered brain damage.8
The chemicals responsible for these life-threatening effects were primarily parathion, methyl parathion, and malathion—all nerve poisons. Methyl parathion caused 54 of the acute poisonings in Texas, while ethyl parathion was responsible for 42 acute poisonings, 24 of which took place in Colorado and 18 in Texas. In Colorado, malathion had poisoned six of the study subjects.
Hale Vandermer, an EPA scientist, warned his bosses about the implication of the Colorado study. What if additional studies confirmed these findings? Could people exposed to nerve pesticides end up with shattered nervous systems or brain damage? If these results held up, Vandermer reasoned, the country would face “a health problem of epidemic proportions.” After all, he noted, beyond America’s farmers, more than 56 percent of American families use organophosphate pesticides to kill insects inside their homes. Vandermer prepared a memo for EPA’s top policy official, assistant administrator Steve Jellinek, but his warning never reached him.9
The Owens brothers’ work and the Colorado study had clearly unsettled senior EPA officials. Credible science was telling them the agrochemical nerve gases used by millions of farmers and urban residents were making people sick, even killing them outright. Their moral and legal obligation to protect public health ought to have convinced them to ban all those dangerous organophosphate toxins. But instead, they elected to look the other way, prolonging the profitable lives of these neurotoxins.
Immediately after learning of the preliminary results of the Colorado study, EPA managers did two things. First, they put together a kind of Potemkin “farmworker program” right in the office of the top pesticides boss, Edwin Johnson.
Poison Spring Page 13