The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced new restrictions on chlorpyrifos products at a June 8 technical briefing held in Washington, D.C. At that technical briefing, the Agency announced its revised risk-assessment for chlorpyrifos products under the U. S. Food Quality Protection Act of 1996.

It is a stated goal of the Clinton administration to reduce potential exposures to pesticides in the U.S., especially potential exposures to children. In its ongoing implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act, the EPA has demonstrated that it intends to apply standards far more restrictive than those historically established by the scientific community, and accepted by the EPA and other regulatory organizations around the world.

Although the Food Quality Protection Act has fundamentally changed the way in which pesticides are regulated in the U.S., the safety of chlorpyrifos products hasn't changed. We stand behind the safety of these products for all of their labeled uses.

Several major print and broadcast news vehicles have seriously mis-characterized the safety of our product Dursban insecticides by claiming that the EPA intends to 'ban' Dursban products because a recent study allegedly found that the product caused 'brain damage' in fetal rats. There is no scientific evidence that the labeled use of Dursban products causes adverse effects, even in particularly sensitive persons such as children.

These blatant misrepresentations have originated with activists, who fail to note that the dose at which these alleged effects occurred in laboratory animals is equivalent to an estimated human exposure to more than 500 applications of this product throughout your home in one day. This would be the equivalent of having your home treated every three minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at a cost of more than $17,000 per day.

Regarding these alleged effects, which activists are now misrepresenting as 'brain damage', the EPA has said that it 'cannot directly link health significance' of these responses in rats to people. Further, according to the Washington Post, the EPA has determined that Dursban products 'pose no imminent threat to public health' and that, consequently, the Agency 'won't order a recall of products containing it'.

Chlorpyrifos products have been on the market for more than 30 years. More than 3,600 studies and reports have been conducted examining critical aspects of chlorpyrifos products as they relate to health and safety.

Taken together, these reports and studies show that currently labeled uses of chlorpyrifos products provide wide margins of safety for both adults and children. No pest control product has been more thoroughly studied.

Chlorpyrifos is used to protect virtually every major crop grown in the U.S. from insect damage. It has been used in and around millions of homes each year to safeguard families and pets from dangerous pests like cockroaches, ticks, fleas, termites, spiders, and fire ants.