Don Fitz is a member of the IWW and is Spokesperson on Toxins for the Gateway Green Alliance in St. Louis.
Nobody knows. Nobody can know. But we do know that chemicals sprayed on golf courses reach golf players, workers who tend greens, and neighbors who can be poisoned by toxins blowing into their homes or seeping into their ground water. Public health dangers are probably thousands or even millions of times greater than given in risk analyses. How can public health agencies underestimate the danger so massively? There are at least three reasons.
1. Few chemicals studied. Health studies have been completed on only a very small number of the insecticides, herbicides and fungicides used. In 1995, the New York Dept of Law complained that the US Environmental Protection Agency allows marketing of pesticides still being reviewed and that "only one of the 34 most commonly used pesticides for turf and lawn care has completed this review."
2. Unreported chemicals. The US government requires chemical companies to list "active" ingredients on pesticide labels. But companies do not have to list "inert" ingredients because they may be trade secrets. Webster's defines "inert" as "still, dormant," which would suggest that "inert chemicals" don't do anything to you. Wrong. In the world of agency-babble, "inert" means anything not required to be listed as "active." "Inerts" can be, and often are, more toxic than "actives." US pesticides contain about 300 different "actives" and about 1700 different "inerts." Besides a rich array of organochlorines, pesticide inerts include asbestos, lead, cadmium, and mercury oleate. These chemicals are not good for you.
3. Chemical interactions. Risk analyses only study the effects of single chemicals. They never study the effect of multiple chemicals working together. The June, 1996 issue of Science documents the fallacy of studying chemicals in isolation. Three articles (pp. 1418, 1451, 1489^-1492) demonstrate that organochlorines which may be very weak in their toxic effects when studied alone are 160 to 1600 times more toxic when in the presence of just one other organochlorine. The number of interactions between 2000 chemicals in pesticides (or the 60,000 man-made chemicals) is quite large (roughly equal to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world, give or take a few trillion orders of magnitude). Who knows the danger of chemicals sprayed on golf courses? Nobody knows.
