EPA Reaffirms Continued Use of Pesticide Linked to Learning Disabilities

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Office of Pesticide Programs proposed reregistering malathion, an organophosphate pesticide linked to learning disabilities, as it claims in a new risk assessment that the chemical is 100 times less dangerous than it previously thought, even at the same exposure and toxicity levels. The July 16 proposed action relies again on a misguided new approach to evaluating organophosphates, which includes the continued use of misused testing methodology.

Organophosphates are among the most widely applied pesticides in the country and can cause attention deficit and autism spectrum disorders, according to peer-reviewed studies. The EPA is reevaluating organophosphate health risk studies to decide whether to uphold safeguards for children and farmworkers. During this process, the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs is relying more on cell-based tests than more reliable animal and human observational science. Consequently, EPA is increasingly concluding that organophosphates are less harmful than years of independent scientific evidence shows.

“EPA admits that people will be harmed by malathion exposure, and yet the Agency’s proposed decision falls short of adequately protecting children from harmful pesticide exposure that can lead to learning disabilities,” said Patti Goldman, Earthjustice attorney. “By improperly downplaying the known risks of organophosphate exposure, EPA is squandering a critical chance to safeguard the least-protected, especially farmworker communities, when the Agency should be doing the opposite.”

With this proposal, EPA is backtracking on its 2015 finding that children must be afforded extra protection from organophosphate pesticides because of the link between organophosphate exposure and learning disabilities and behavioral disorders from in-utero exposures. EPA is basing its reversals on petri dish tests called “New Approach Methodologies,” or NAMs. While NAMs can predict a chemical’s potential to cause eye or skin irritations, NAMs are ill-equipped to evaluate whether organophosphates will cause learning disabilities or behavioral disorders. Using NAMs to reduce public health protections for children is unprecedented.

EPA’s new findings come three years after Earthjustice, along with a coalition of 11 health, civil rights, farmworker, and learning disability advocacy groups, petitioned EPA to ban organophosphates. The 2021 petition was just as EPA banned food uses of chlorpyrifos, the most popular organophosphate, because it could not find it safe for children. In 2022, a court sent the ban back to the EPA, and now the agency plans to partially reinstate it before the end of the year.

EPA opened a 60-day public comment period for the malathion risk assessment and proposed decision. More risk assessments and proposed decisions are expected in the coming years, likely with similar misuse of NAMs.