The bad news is the Bush administration frequently tries outrageous stunts that undermine public health. The good news is, once in a while, they don’t get away with it. The issue this time is rat poison.<\/p>\n
The pesticide industry started lobbing hard in the late 1990s against regulations designed to protect children and wildlife from becoming unintended victims of rat poisons. Clinton’s EPA described the poisons as posing “a significant risk of accidental exposure to humans, particularly children, household pets, and non-target animals,” but approved their use because the poisons helped contain diseases carried by rats and mice. <\/p>\n
In 1998, Clinton, however, called for two new safeguards: adding an agent to make the poison taste more bitter and a dye that would make it more obvious if a child had ingested the poison. Then Bush took office.<\/p>\n
In 2001, Bush’s EPA reversed course and announced a “mutual agreement” with rodenticide makers that killed the regulations. How offensive was the administration’s work? The Natural Resources Defense Council obtained documents<\/a> showing that Bush’s EPA not only worked hand-in-hand with the industry in rewriting the rules, but also complied when manufacturers wanted the risks associated with rat poison downplayed in EPA assessments.<\/p>\n At the behest of the industry, the EPA made broad changes to play down the dangers posed by rat poison, including rewriting a section describing the fatal poisoning of seven deer. <\/p>\n While refusing to meet with consumer and environmental groups, the agency held five closed-door meetings with members of the Rodenticide Registrants Task Force, whose members include Syngenta Crop Protection, Bell Laboratories Inc. and LiphaTech Inc.<\/p>\n EPA deleted language the industry objected to: At one point a staffer wrote in an e-mail that there would be “no references to mitigation and no words\/phrases etc. that could evoke emotion on the part of” the industry task force. The document initially said that seven deer in New York state “have been poisoned by anticoagulants. . . . The incidents depict how toxic rodenticide baits can be even to large animals”; at the industry’s suggestion this was amended to “Seven deer in New York state tested positive for anticoagulants,” with the second phrase dropped altogether.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n