Mosquito-borne West Nile Virus encephalitis touched down in our hemisphere in the fall of 1999 in New York City. Forty-seven New Yorkers became ill. No one died directly from contact with the virus.

In September 1999, West Nile was found in two species of mosquitoes trapped in Greenwich and in the brain tissue of crows from Greenwich to Madison. Seventy-eight people in Connecticut were tested for the virus. None tested positive.

Meanwhile, New York public health officials were freaking out. At ground zero, public literature from the period is a little bit deranged. If they found a dead bird, the New York state health board warned people to "use a shovel or wear gloves to place it in a refrigerator or ice chest that is not used for food." Or, in absence of a shovel and ice chest, to "place plastic bags of ice over the dead bird and cover it with a bucket until health officials arrive." They assured the public that "to date, there is no indication that a pet having any type of contact with a dead bird, including eating it, will develop West Nile Virus."

At least Rudy made it all kind of interesting.  But as the exotic new disease rippled out from The City, a whole host of problems tagged along on its coattails. What kind of chemicals would kill the little varmints? In New York, large-scale pesticide use quickly went from Guiliani's "last resort" to a silent default measure, and, eventually [in a SundayNew York Times editorial headed, "Why the Country Must Spray,"  by Dr. Douglas Aspros, Westchester County Board of Health President] to a "sensible public health measure" resulting from "a coordinated regional planning effort" and a "complex policy choice."

My, how those big city boys can ice a cake. It was fascinating, really, to watch the time-delay version of the whole "crisis" unfold and rhetoric roll out like a big red resmethrin carpet. Michael Gochfeld, professor of Environmental and Community Medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and School of Public Health, puts the West Nile "crisis" in perspective. "The media always paired the words 'lethal' or 'deadly' with 'West Nile' or 'encephalitis,' reinforcing in the public's mind the danger from the disease," he writes. "But it would be equally appropriate to characterize West Nile Virus infection as 'inapparent,' 'usually asymptomatic,' or 'occasionally serious.'"

Gochfeld points out the stats of another human epidemic of West Nile Virus infection in 1996 Romania, evaluated and controlled in part by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 94,000 people were infected. About 400 developed the "clinically apparent" disease, and of these, 15 died. Fifteen. Almost all were over age 65.

The body of literature linking pyrethroids -- the class of chemicals which includes resmethrin, commonly known as Scourge -- with pretty bad health problems is scattered, disjointed and disturbing. This isn't a clear-cut activist issue like air pollution or anti-discrimination laws. The key to understanding how pesticides like Scourge can harm us is knowing how they affect hormones in our bodies.

Researchers have known since the early '70s that breast cancer is linked to levels of the female hormone estrogen; late onset of menstruation and early menopause, for example, both reduce lifetime exposure to estrogen and, in turn, reduce breast cancer risk. Other clues include studies which have found a 40-50 percent increased risk of breast cancer for women who take estrogen pills or women who use birth control pills.

It turns out that Scourge may be hundreds of times worse than birth control pills in contributing to diseases like breast cancer. Pyrethroids can act like estrogen-mimickers. Because their structure is similar, pyrethroids can fool the body into thinking it is estrogen, and can slide into all of the body's natural estrogen receptors like a key into a lock. These new hybrid molecules can even prompt the body to produce mass amounts of new receptors, which act like estrogen "magnets," thus starting the whole cycle over again. And finally, since both natural estrogen and xenoestrogens (synthetically manufactured chemicals) are fat soluble, they're attracted to regions of the body where fat is concentrated: as in women's breasts.

At the forefront of the breast cancer debate are four researchers from the Mt. Sinai Medical School whose 1999 study pointed to the clear link between estrogen activity and cellular pyrethroid exposure. The four women, Vera Go, Joan Garey, Mary Wolff and Beatriz Pogo, used four types of pyrethroids at concentrations similar to the amounts of DDT that would be necessary to disrupt estrogen systems -- "high" levels like 20 billionths of a gram of the chemical for each milliliter of blood. The chemicals were used to treat cultures of human breast cancer cells. All four types of pyrethroids caused breast cancer cells to proliferate.

"Estrogens," the authors resolved, "whether natural or synthetic, clearly influence reproductive development, senescence [senility], and carcinogenesis [the birth of cancer]. Pyrethroid insecticides are now the most widely used agents for indoor pest control, providing potential for human exposure.

"These findings suggest," they concluded, "that pyrethroids should be considered to be hormone disrupters, and their potential to affect endocrine function in humans and wildlife should be investigated."

Apart from what they do to human hormones, spraying any pesticide is also bad news for insects from honeybees to butterflies, with praying mantis and ladybird beetles in between. Take away these stock ingredients of a biodiverse world and a complex, contingent set of eco-dominoes could come crashing down around us. Unilateral extermination, in the long term, at one end of the food chain is just not the best thing for us humans up on the other end. That's what famed environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, thought anyway.  A toxicology data base out of Oregon State University shows that resmethrin has persisted in Kentucky soil for nearly 200 days. The half-life of resmethrin in water is 36.5 days. It is listed as "very highly toxic" to fish and "highly toxic" to bees.

Louis Guillette, a Ph.D. University of Florida zoologist, has fed alligators pyrethroid pesticides at dosages of 20 parts per billion and then tested females with more than twice normal estrogen levels.

Guillette presented his findings this past summer at the Beyond Pesticides Conference, organized by the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides.

"I can safely say that all of you here, even now, have DDT and [its breakdown products] DDD and DDE in your bloodstream," he told conference attendees.

Guillette made the point that while state officials argue that applications are far too low to pose any adverse effect, that in many studies there was no increasing linear relation between dosage amount and cancer risk. But, in fact, some studies showed that, paradoxically, the lower the pesticide concentration, the higher the cancer risk.

Then there were the Yaquí children's drawings. Anthropologist Elizabeth Guillette (the wife of the aforementioned zoologist), from the University of Arizona, studied two groups of isolated populations among the indigenous Yaquí, who have settled in the Yaquí Valley of northwestern Mexico. One group farms in the valley, where pesticides including pyrethroids have been used for 60 years, and one group in the pesticide-free foothills. Guillette had the children draw stick figures at various developmental stages. The "organic" kids' drawings are round, sloppy, but robustly human-looking. The children of pesticide farmers drew figures that looked eerily unfinished and disjointed.

There was a street fair at 118th Street selling produce the day of the Beyond Pesticides Conference at Riverside Church in Manhattan. A nice little irony, considering that the conference opened with a real-time video of spray trucks cruising the Bronx trailing plumes of Anvil that enveloped sidewalks, including the produce stands that line New York's city streets.

The footage, captured by videographer Roy Doremus, showed people choking and holding up their collars to their mouths as the truck passed by. This is when you might start to think twice not only about your own body, but the apple that John Stossel said was safe -- any produce found "with traces of Sumithrin [Anvil 10+10's active ingredient] could be subject to sanctions such as seizure or injunction by the FDA..." said city Assembly member Scott Stringer when he saw the tape. Yet, there is no law on the books that says officials must notify sidewalk stands like these, or even sound a warning telling people to get off the streets during spraying.

"It would be a totally different scenario if they would do this at 3, 4 in the morning," said Doremus. Yet the spraying started before midnight on a balmy August Friday night.

The conference closed with a speech by the event's big draw, presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Consumer advocate Nader was a little late getting to the podium that Saturday night. Riverside Church was filled with Greens. One red-haired Nader-supporter pushed her way to the third pew wearing a T-shirt that read "Bush and Gore make me wanna Ralph!" A woman across from her whispered "I'm just here to see Ralph..." A woman in front of them both, who had been knitting a potholder the entire four hours of the conference, responded, "I'm here to ask him where he was last year, when they sprayed Malathion."

Nader's sermon was a little groggy, a little hit-and-miss for the feature speaker at a pesticides conference, but coherently in line with the consumer advocacy slant he's pushed for 35 years. "Corporate science pervades the whole area of evaluation of technology on health and safety," he said. "It's driven by the political power of the Monsanto or the DuPont. It demands confidentiality. And it's driven overwhelmingly by the profit message."

The conclusion? "[It] is a rather lethal combination," Nader said, "when you combine the political power of these companies to get their ways in Washington with the profit-driven motive...the whole process is rigged in favor of more and more chemical application."

The public is also an indispensable pawn in reinforcing the corporate profit loop. In facing pesticide spraying, "there is a certain resignation that affects a community," said Nader. "We have to ask what are the risks here?  Somehow the tide's not turning fast enough."

Nader's most sobering piece of evidence was a simple statistic. With the release of two numbers, he laid the trump card on the whole debate. The verdict on pesticides' usefulness has already come in. Even if all the cancer studies are wrong, even if pesticides are great snacks for honeybees and fish, they're not all that great at doing what they're designed to do. "There have been 10 times more chemical applications since 1962," said Nader, "and still, 30 percent of crops are lost to insects. "This is technology out of control of the science," he finished. "That's happened with the motor vehicle, the nuclear power plant, and it's certainly happening in the area of pesticides." 

When we spoke with Anthony Iton, director of the Stamford Health Department, it was late. But Iton wasn't finished with his day -- he was on his way out the door to talk to local parents at schools in the Stamford spray zone.  Iton is cautiously in favor of resmethrin spraying. "I'm very sensitive to the concerns of people affected by spraying," he said, "and I think there's too much pesticide use for purely aesthetic purposes."  Yet, he is very clear in his opposition to the conclusions of the recent Mt. Sinai study. "I don't think that any reasonable person can conclude that these pesticides are carcinogens," he said. "If you put the amount on one side of the scale that are used daily in lawn and tree treatments and golf courses versus the amount used in trying to protect the population from a known potential killer, there's no comparison. "It's not completely logical to say 'I don't have a choice,'" Iton added, referring to a growing number of citizens who have begun to question whether spraying is appropriate. "Well, you're right. You don't. There's no such thing as perfect individual rights. People are deluding themselves if they think they live in this perfect world where they have absolute choice. What we do have access to is information."

And the information at hand, he said, indicates the cancer-pesticide studies at the forefront are questionable.

"If you test many naturally-occurring products [like soy proteins]," Iton argued, "you get much more potent endocrine disrupters than the synthetic chemicals."

In a foreword to a controversial anti-pesticide best-seller published in 1996, Our Stolen Future (by scientist/journalist team Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers), Vice President Al Gore wrote, "Today, reports in leading medical journals point ominously to hormone-disrupting chemicals' effect on our fertility -- on our children."

Iton also uses the kid card in defending the properties of pyrethroid pesticides. "There's another product called Eliminite, he said, "which is a prescription product for kids with scabies. You could put this on a 2-month-old. You put it on from their hairline to their toes. You leave it on for 14 hours. Then you put it on again in many cases. And these products have about 1,000 times the concentration of pyrethroids.

"Do you think the FDA would be letting us use these things on babies' heads if they were that dangerous?" he asked.   More than 37 medical practitioners at Stamford Hospital, in departments from Ob/Gyn to Endoscopy, think the FDA would do just that. In a petition organized over the summer, they signed a statement reading, "We, the undersigned, as medical professionals, believe that the current spraying of pesticides poses a significant health hazard to humans both in an immediate and long-term basis... We call for an immediate halt to any further widespread spraying of pesticides..."

The doctors and nurses in the statement named the Mt. Sinai study as a link between pyrethroids and breast cancer, and recognized the "unquantifiable, yet very real, long-term health and environmental risks of ground spraying..."

The petition was released to the media as well as local and state public health and elected officials on Aug. 15.

Sheldon Krimsky, professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Tufts University and author of Hormonal Chaos, agrees with the Stamford doctors.  Krimsky is one of the leading experts in the field of environmental toxins.  It was when he began researching for his book, a chronicle of environmental endocrine disruption, that he began to doubt the federal monitoring system in place.

"I was really surprised that with all the hype on pyrethroids and how safe they are... I was coming up with literature that says these things are neurotoxic chemicals. Now I have more questions than answers. All the folklore about how safe they are is from 20 years ago."

The extent to which pesticides are being tested federally is even more alarming. Of the 87,000 known carcinogens in use today, only 187 are listed.  "The government [as administered by the EPA] passed a law in 1996 saying the government has to start testing," Krimsky explained. "They won't start doing this until 2004. What about all the stuff we use in the meantime that hasn't been tested? Are you playing Russian roulette by putting these chemicals (POISONS) out there?

"We don't have the money to look at these [pesticides] as we should," he continued. "The burden is on people to find something wrong with them. [The EPA] admits that we don't have enough information -- that these are endocrine disrupters."

Krimsky is critical of top-level publications like the Connecticut Fact Sheet, which have claimed that the solution to West Nile, in the form of Scourge, presents almost no danger to humans. "Someone's decided to put a guess down," he said. "It hasn't gone through any peer review, or the National Academy. There's no justification. There's no basis... Any time there's a cancer risk for endocrine disruption to animals [in animal lab trials], you're taking a risk."

He dismantles the "soy defense" used by public health officials like Iton.  The fact that similar chemicals are found in nature does not make them automatically safe, he said. "The fact that they're similar does not mean they're the same," Krimsky said. "All you need is one change in one protein and you have clinical damage.

"To say that they're the same is just false," he added. "Pyrethrins are natural substances; pyrethroids are not. They have different ring structures and different toxic effects."

Krimsky sees another more immediate consequence on the horizon: the potential for insect immunity to over-used pesticides. "You're going to see a resistant strain of these insects," he predicted. "It's like every time you get the sniffles, you don't use an antibiotic. We're running out of those. You want to use the worst treatment for the worst cases...you don't want to use the extreme approach if the risk is not that high."

In the end, Krimsky believes "we shouldn't be in a position to choose between a neurotoxic virus and a neurotoxic chemical. "That," he said, "is an untenable choice."

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