PESTICIDE RISK FROM APPLES: WHO'S RIGHT?

[摘要] No wonder there's alarm—and confusion—over apples and pesticides.An environmental group warns that preschoolers can face as much as 910 times the acceptable cancer risk from eating chemically treated apple products.Apple growers immediately protest. They say a person would have to eat 28,000 pounds of apples a day for 70 years to equal the dose of chemicals that causes cancer in laboratory rats. Makers of applesauce and apple juice say they check for the specific cancer-causing agent, and hardly ever find it.So how much of a threat is there from apples and the pesticide daminozide? A consensus on the issue is unlikely. Scientific studies raise legitimate concern that a substance known as UDMH, which is produced as daminozide breaks down, can cause cancer. But the truth about the degree of risk probably lies somewhere between the numbers cited on both sides.The EPA says the Natural Resources Defense Council overstated the dangers to children tenfold or more. "We're trying to say it's not quite" the "basis for panic as people have assumed," says . . . an extension horticulturist for tree druits. . . "All of us in the scientific industry feel that they [the council] are vastly overstating the problem."The EPA's biggest problem with the Natural Resources Defense Council study is that the group's cancer-potency figures for UDMH come from an EPA study thrown out years ago as flawed. . . . Still, preliminary results from the EPA's new study have led it to conclude that Alar should be banned.

[学科分类] 儿科学