Taking 'Cides

Fight over disclosure of pesticide ingredients heats up in California

Posted at 6:57 AM on 19 Oct 2007

In California, a battle is raging over a pesticide that critics say is sickening hundreds of residents as it's being sprayed over large swaths of Monterey County to battle a crop-destroying moth. Residents who became ill after the first application of the pesticide want to know what's in it that could cause asthma-like symptoms, rashes, stomach pains, and burning eyes. But regulators have kept quiet about what's in the mix -- dubbed CheckMate by its manufacturer -- due to laws protecting pesticide ingredients as trade secrets. A district judge ordered a temporary halt to the spraying last week due to concern for public health, and the judge may eventually break new legal ground in the U.S. by ruling whether trade secrets trump the public's right to know. Meanwhile, agricultural interests are sweating; officials have said that if the invasive moth reigns unchecked, it could damage some 250 species of plants and destroy $2.6 billion worth of crops.

sources: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times

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Comments: (2 comments)

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Taking 'Cides

Come on Grist....Fact Checking!....Journalism 101. Just becasue the sensationalsit media uses the wrong term in order to create fear and sell papers, don;t you play along. What they're spraying from our skies is a pheromone (sp). It's a synthetic odor intended to confuse male moths so they don't make it to (with?) the females. It's a "pesticide" only in the sense that that's the category EPA put it in, it's not a pesicide like a poison. It's more like a perfume.

by Dan deGrassi at 4:59 PM on 19 Oct 2007

"breaking new legal ground"

Presumably a sad history could be written, on how in US jurisprudence, trade secrets were OF COURSE more inviolable than the public's right to know. Why, it would have been positively un-American to think otherwise.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 1:35 AM on 20 Oct 2007

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