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Question 5: What safeguards are there to ensure the long-term safety of
newly released pesticides?

A new pesticide would have to pass a screening test for carcinogenicity.

E.g. Amles test - on mutagenicity in bacteria, or Karyotyping which
uses nuclear changes in human white blood cells.

It would then be fed to test animals, c.g. rats, to determine its
Lp.50. The dose at which 50% of the test animals dio. This is a measure

of acute toxicity.

Chronic toxicity is measured by feeding the animal the maximal dose
which does not kill the animal for 1/2 its life span. This is done on two
generations of the animal in strains especially susceptible to various
cancers. This gives a measure of carcinogenicity, effects on repreduction
and teratogenicity.

Question 6: Are these tests adequate?
No test on animals is adequate to access the hazard to humans. However,

the tests currently used are much tougher than they were a few years ago,
and are the best we can do short of human experimentation.

Question 7: What is the short and. long-term safety of penticides?

Acute tonicity cen ho fudset from the LDSO,

The following is a table of pesticides used and their LD50's.

These doses were obtained from animal studies, and accidental overdoses.
The corresponding dose for a baby could be 1/20 of this amount, and for a
child of 10 years about 1/2 of this amount.

The concentrates of several of the pesticides used are hazardous.

The dilute products as used in the sprayer (usual concentration 0.1%)
pose a very small and acceptable hazard.

The long-term effects of some of the pesticides such as 24D have been
well documented after many years of large scale usage, and their safuty
can be af firmed. .

It should be noted that 24D, unlike its fellow chliorphenery compound,
2457, cannot in theory, and does nat in practice contain Dioxans as byproducts.
It does not, therefore, have the same potential for teratogenicity that
245T does.

Other newer pesticides, such as Roundup (Glyphosate), have not been
used for sufficiently long to allow a dogmatic assertion of its long-term

safety.

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