EPA’s Refusal to Cancel Seresto Flea Collars Shows Holes in Pesticide Regulation
This opinion piece was originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The company that makes Seresto flea and tick collars celebrated the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent refusal to revoke approval of the collars — allegedly linked to thousands of pet deaths in recent years — as proof of their safety.
But what the agency actually concluded was that even after more than 100,000 complaints of harm to pets, its own data-collection practices were so lacking in detail it was impossible to draw firm conclusions about the collar’s safety.
The EPA’s timid response — which includes requiring warning labels and increased reporting — spotlights that the EPA rarely reverses approval of any toxic pesticide product even when reports of harm stack up.
As detailed in a Congressional hearing on Seresto collars led by Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, the agency’s see-no-evil regulatory approach is anchored in the reality that while the EPA is required to track harm reports, it has no process in place to actually assess and address that harm.
And so it rarely does.
The agency’s failure, for years, to take any action on Seresto collars laid bare glaring deficiencies in how the agency addresses the safety concerns of all pesticides.
For example, as overuse of the pesticide glyphosate triggered the evolution of glyphosate-tolerant super-weeds across millions of acres, the EPA approved a World War II-era pesticide called dicamba for use on crops engineered to withstand the pesticide. The approval came even though the agency knew dicamba’s propensity to drift and emit gases in hot weather routinely cause damage to nontarget areas, including miles from where it was sprayed.
Researchers estimate dicamba drift damages millions of acres of fields, vineyards, gardens and natural areas each year. But rather than canceling the product’s registration, the EPA has bowed to pressure from industrial agriculture groups and opted to simply add more applications restrictions — guidelines that are virtually impossible to follow in real-world conditions. So, the drift damage has continued.
Equally troubling is the EPA’s ongoing approval of atrazine, a pesticide banned in many nations but the second most-used U.S. pesticide. In 2020 the agency reapproved the pesticide despite compelling research showing it disrupts hormonal signaling in frogs, impairs fish reproduction and is linked to birth defects and cancer in humans.
In 2021 the EPA reapproved paraquat, which is banned in the European Union, China and Brazil. The weedkiller is so acutely toxic that it has resulted in at least 27 U.S. fatalities in 30 years. It has been found to double the risk of Parkinson’s disease in farmworkers and to harm and kill wildlife, including endangered species.
The EPA’s failed regulatory system is rooted in the fact that unlike the European Union and several other countries, U.S pesticide safety assessments reject the “precautionary principle.”
Had that principle been followed, the EPA may never have approved Seresto collars, which release the neurotoxic pesticides imidacloprid and flumethrin. The pesticides’ synergistic effects make them more toxic to fleas and ticks and, potentially, to pets and people. But the EPA has no idea what those harms might be because it does not fully assesses the increased toxicity of pesticide mixtures.
Beyond requiring more thorough initial safety assessments, the precautionary principle requires an acknowledgement that ongoing scientific research will inevitably find evidence of harm undetected by the pesticide-maker’s initial toxicity studies. But even amid new evidence of harm, the EPA typically continues to rely too heavily on pesticide industry toxicity studies — limited studies unavailable for review by independent scientists that can only provide limited assurances of safety.
The precautionary principle requires a much higher burden of proof that a chemical is safe, empowering regulators to proactively prevent a harmful activity in the face of uncertainty of safety, and to mandate safer alternatives.
Adopting the precautionary principle would require a 180-degree pivot among EPA regulators accustomed to putting the demands of polluting industries ahead of enforcing science-based standards that prioritize the safety of people, animals and plants.
The agency recently took an important step when, for the first time in its history, it made incident reports tracking pesticides’ harms over the past 10 years available to the public in a searchable database, to be updated monthly.
Making timely incident data publicly available will help independent researchers better understand the harms specific pesticides cause and hold regulators and pesticide companies accountable for dealing with the real-world damage from these products.
But as the ongoing approval of Seresto flea collars demonstrates, making reports of pesticide harm more widely accessible won’t result in stronger, science-based protections unless the EPA adopts a more robust, safety-first standard that requires aggressively addressing mounting evidence of pesticides’ harms.
Nathan Donley, Ph.D., a Kansas City native, is environmental health science director at the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. He resides in Olympia, Wash.
Originally published at https://www.stltoday.com on September 15, 2023.
