FINALLY, after disastrous back-and-forth, political interference, and regulatory incompetence, chlorpyrifos, one of the most toxic pesticides on the market, has been banned for use on food. This is the pesticide chiefly responsible for my beloved daughter Katherine's death from leukemia in 2002. Unfortunately, for now it is not banned for applications like mosquito spraying, which can be equally dangerous to human health. But it is good to take a moment to celebrate the scientists and activists, some of whom I now know, who worked unceasingly for decades to stop this one way we are poisoning ourselves and our children. Most people do not realize that under TSCA, the previous law regulating chemicals, only six substances have been banned since 1976, and the ban on asbestos was overturned in court. Tens of thousands of chemicals were grandfathered in with no testing at all for human health and safety. This is why today, all children now born in the U.S. come into the world contaminated with hundreds of different carcinogenic, mutagenic, neurotoxic, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Read more at https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/18/chlorpyrifos/
