The U.S. EPA announced today that it would be tightening up the safety requirements on ten nasty rodenticides that are blamed for poisoning around 10,000 children -- mostly black and Latino inner-city kids -- every year. Those ten chemicals will no longer be available in the form of little pellets that look like candy, and that small children are so prone to stick in their mouths. The new rules will require non-agricultural users of rat poison to use it only inside tamper-resistant bait stations designed to protect kids.
This is great news, and a long time in coming. There's just one catch: These new safety requirements aren't going into effect for a while. Manufacturers get three years to change their practices. EPA has determined a final "release for shipment" date for the last batch of deadly pellets on June 4, 2011.
Three years ... let's see, three years times 10,000 poisonings a year ... let me get my calculator ... That means about 30,000 more sick kids before we clean this mess up. You've got to be kidding me.
It's not like the manufacturers couldn't see this coming. The EPA first issued restrictions on these pesticides in 1998, finding that in their current form, they posed an "unreasonable risk" to children, but rescinded the rules in 2001 after chemical companies balked.
In 2004, the Natural Resources Defense Council and West Harlem Environmental Action filed suit against the U.S. EPA for failing to protect children from rat poison. In 2005, a federal judge sided with the children's advocates, and directed the EPA to make the manufacturers change their practices.
Ten years hence, EPA has finally issued the regulations. But why rush things? From EPA's Final Risk Mitigation Decision:
The anticoagulants interfere with blood clotting, and death can result from excessive bleeding. Bromethalin is a nerve toxicant that causes respiratory distress. Cholecalciferol is vitamin D3, which in small dosages is needed for good health in most mammals, but in massive doses is toxic, especially to rodents. Zinc phosphide causes liberation of toxic phosphine gas in the stomach.
The second-generation anticoagulants are especially hazardous for several reasons. They are highly toxic, and they persist a long time in body tissues ...
... not to mention that children who already suffer the multiple burdens of substandard housing and urban pollution are disproportionately exposed.
The EPA has been quibbling over the details of this change for more than ten years. What possible reason could there be for delaying this much-needed action any longer? It's time to get candy-shaped rat poison off the market and out of the mouths of inner-city kids, without wasting another day to appease the manufacturers.
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Comments
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PermieWriter Posted 8:02 am
30 May 2008
Rodent predation has long been the basis of the human/feline relationship, and it's up to us to maintain it by favoring cats with excellent rat hunting skills.
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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Wolverine Posted 9:17 am
30 May 2008
If you are opposed to human babies being poisoned by this crap, you should be opposed to any species or any part of the Earth being poisoned by it.
Sorry, but house cats are only native to Egypt. In the U.S., they're responsible for killing millions of birds every year, in addition to other native species. While they're a non-poisonous method of dealing with rodents, they cause their own ecological problems.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 10:00 am
30 May 2008
Really, the best way to get rid of rats is to get rid of what attracts them...unprotected food.
Put all food in rat-proof containers, cover up all openings where rats could in, clean up, keeps weeds to a minimum, that sorta stuff.
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caniscandida Posted 8:56 pm
30 May 2008
Poison should certainly be put out of the reach of children. Thus far, Dawn Pattison is right, this is "great news," if the idea is in the pipeline to keep poisoned edibles away from children.
But in general, though the issue is not widely recognized, poison should certainly not be put in bait for our fellow sentient creatures, against whom we may entertain some absurd heartless prejudice: e.g. wolves, coyotes, lynxes, mountain lions, ferrets, and even rats.
Saving our childrens' lives is our prime duty as parents. But instructing them carefully regarding the community of living creatures in which we live, and in which we play a supremely powerful part; and our many responsibilities to that community, including being kind to animals; is also a major duty.
Rats deserve our friendship. They can indeed be pushy, and require tough love. But they are good critters all the same.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Fawn Pattison Posted 1:43 am
02 Jun 2008
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caniscandida Posted 7:37 am
02 Jun 2008
I happen to live in West Harlem, across a narrow street from a huge, Laurentide-glacier-dropped boulder that the developers of the neighborhood early in the last century decided could not practically be removed. It lies behind the kitchen of a popular restaurant, and across from the large garbage bins parked outside a church's much-frequented soup kitchen. Not unsurprisingly, rats have colonized that boulder, and are a common sight on this street, especially during the warmer months of the year.
In the basement of our building (and we live on the ground floor, separated by only one storey), rats are regular visitors during the night. From our back bedroom, the computer room, where I am now, we can look out onto the floor of the airshaft, down on the basement level; often enough, when the janitorial staff have collected the trash there, I have heard and seen rats scurrying around excitedly down there, observing them from this very window over my right shoulder.
Occasionally, no doubt because we live on the ground floor, in an older building, in which the fixtures for plumbing, heating and gas have a lot of history and wear, we are visited by mice. They do not settle in, but they visit, whenever their normal preferred residence is disturbed by some sort of construction. I have not seen any in well over a year; but I recall, one night very late, when I was reading on the sofa, watching a pair of them playing tag on the dining room floor.
It is possible that our super, and all the other people responsible for maintenance in the neighboring buildings, put down poisoned traps for rats and mice. We ourselves never complained, nor requested that he exterminate our mice. As it turned out, the mice left on their own.
"Sleazy landlords" can indeed be harmful to the health of a building's residents, much more so than rats, e.g. when they restrict availability of heat and hot water. They can be found in many parts of the city, though more notably lately in the South Bronx than in Harlem, which in fact is being gentrified.
Killing animals, when that is the only way to protect the health and safety of human beings, is justified. But it should never be done without regret.
TasPar is right about rat-proof containers. Also important, though, in these old neighborhoods, is sealing off access avenues within decaying architecture.
The moral is, we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem, in a problem-filled world, in which love is all too scarce, if we think that killing animals whom we find inconvenient is normal, natural, unobjectionable, acceptable, even desirable.
Human beings' sense of entitlement is the enemy of the human race (and other living creatures).
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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