Media Claims Are Not Always Accurate

"Shrinking penis” is the newest battlecry of the anti-pesticide community. Claims have been made that man-made chemicals used to control pests in homes and farms now threaten our hormonal systems and body functions.

The media has been trumpeting allegations made by the authors of Our Stolen Future of “plummeting human sperm counts and an epidemic of undescended testicles and shrinking penises that are the result of major endocrine disruptions.” Reading or hearing about these allegations, which are based on anecdotes, questionable stories and unsupportable hypotheses, terrifies the public.

For example, Jessica Mathews, in the March 11, l996, Washington Post wrote: “...hormone disrupters can do their damage in infinitesimal doses, concentrations of one part per trillion...There are many thousands of persistent organic pollutants on the market, of which 50 are so far known to be hormone disrupters...Earlier struggles over nitrates, saccharin, formaldehyde, Times Beach, Love Canal, cholesterol, alar and even tobacco, look like kids’ stuff.” These are dangerous claims that lack scientific basis.

FALSE CLAIMS? One of the references cited in Our Stolen Future is an observation by biologist Louis Guillette that in Lake Apopka, Fla., alligators’ penises are “one-third to one-half normal size.” He blames this on a major spill of miticide dicofol which occurred in 1980. Further, he implicates DDT in the situation by saying that dicofol degrades into a DDE-like product which is related to DDT.

What is not mentioned in Our Stolen Future is the fact that Lake Apopka was already a cesspool in 1950 due to overdoses of citrus processing wastes and sewage effluent. Audubon magazine in September 1971 reported that thousands of turtles and fish died from these industrial wastes in Lake Apopka.

Refutations of these claims can be found in an article by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a San Jose State University biologist, in the Fall 1996 edition of 2lst Century, a quarterly publication. He states that in 1994, J. Hendell, in Fundamental & Applied Toxicology, reported that mixtures of the fertilizer and pesticides that were alleged to be hormone disrupters were fed to rodents at up to 100 times the average in contaminated ground water with no adverse reproductive effects.

Dr. Alice Ottoboni, a California State toxicologist, carried out feeding experiments on rats and dogs for years and reported that “DDT makes animals much more fertile than those without DDT.”

Countering claims of the authors that the number of undescended testicles were increasing, G.S. Berkowitz wrote in Pediatrics, Volume 92, 1993, that U.S. hospital records prove otherwise. The authors tried to tie an increase in prostate cancers to exposure to synthetic estrogens. Dr. A.L. Potosky, in a 1995 issue of AMA Journal, said the increase came from increased screening and longevity.

Theo Colborn and her associates who wrote Our Stolen Future seem eager to have us believe that all organochlorine compounds can mimic environmental hormones, but they present no proof of such beliefs. Dr. Stephen Safe in Environmental Health Perspectives, 1995, tested the effects of organochlorine compounds in the average human diet. He concluded that “the total estrogenic activity of those compounds is 40 million-fold lower than that of the natural components of vegetables and other foods consumed daily.”

In “Proceedings of International Environmental Conference,” 1995, Dr. Robert Golden summed up research by numerous toxicologists and physiologists and showed that DDT, DDE, heptachlor, chlordane and many types of PCBs have no significant estrogenic activity. He included data on natural environmental substances that do indeed mimic normal hormones or affect natural hormones in animals. Golden writes that the authors of Our Stolen Future could probably have developed more frightening endocrine disrupting scenarios that are based on healthy diets containing cereals, fruits and vegetables.

Chlorine is also a target in Our Stolen Future. In American Journal of Public Health, 1994, Dr. G.W. Gribble points out that chlorine is as natural to our world as is carbon, hydrogen or oxygen. He explained that nearly 2,000 chlorinated compounds are already being produced naturally. Each year, million tons of chloromethane comes from sources such as decaying wood, and 400,000 tons of chlorinated phenols arises from Swedish peat bogs. Such pollution dwarfs the 26 million tons made by man. Gribble challenges the conclusion in Our Stolen Future that a chemical is toxic because it contains chlorine. Milk is not as toxic as nerve gas because it contains phosphorus.

I believe it is a Myth Conception that common sense will prevail in the battle for the public’s mind. Despite Vice President Gore’s strong endorsement of Our Stolen Future as a sequel to Silent Spring, PCOs must urge their congressional representatives to pressure EPA to use only the best scientific data and actual usage information in implementing the Food Quality Protection Act. Our ability to protect the nation’s food, health and property will be seriously affected by indiscriminate cancellations of many registered pesticides.

Harry Katz, a contributing editor to PCT, may be contacted at Berkshire E-3076, Deerfield Beach FL 33442, 954/427-9716.