The recent report on pesticide concerns on Kauai and elsewhere in Hawaii makes important recommendations to solve this decade-long debate about pesticide safety.
I was asked to serve on the Joint Fact-Finding (JFF) committee but took the role as a pro bono liaison, because I live only part-time on Kauai.
My expertise concerns human exposure to pesticides and toxic chemicals and making recommendations to federal and state officials outlining appropriate environmental studies to assess human health risks.
I served as the senior health and science adviser to Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 Chicago for several decades and have been with the University of Illinois School of Public Health.
I have investigated roughly 150 environmental cases of potential chemical exposure.
Peter Adler and JFF members requested that I evaluate the University of Hawaii 2013 Kauai air study and the Waimea Canyon Middle School (WCMS) events that occurred on Kauai.
The WCMS events were a key reason for undertaking and funding the JFF Kauai pesticides evaluation.
The UH air study reached unsupportable conclusions that stinkweed and a chemical component called methyl isothiocyanate (MITC) likely caused the health issues at local schools. This was a $100,000 unpublished study that did not go through a scientific peer-review process as is done with published studies.
Over the years there have been repeated statements in the press concluding that stinkweed and specifically MITC caused the adverse effects at WCMS. The scientific facts are not there to support this conclusion.
The UH study found that MITC was 230 times below a California Air Health Criteria at WCMS, and 12 times below the criteria at an active stinkweed site tested on Maui.
While excessive oral ingestion of stinkweed has known health effects, no literature or cases are known indicating that outdoor air levels of stinkweed organics are capable of causing the symptoms reported at WCMS.
The authors should have included comparison to health criteria and conducted a complete literature review.
Most recently, the state Department of Health has suggested that mass hysteria (psychogenic illness) as the probable cause of the WCMS events. These are rare events.
In 30 years investigating chemical-related health cases in conjunction with health departments from Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), we never came across a mass psychogenic event. Sure, it is a possibility, but the repeated events at the Kauai school, the severity of the symptoms, and no such determination of hysteria by attending health providers make the psychogenic hypothesis unlikely.
Definitive conclusions could have been more readily drawn in the WCMS episodes and the recent 2016 Syngenta case if blood and urine samples had been analyzed for pesticides and toxic chemicals.
Pesticide residues may have been missed during the WCMS analytical testing if broad scan (comprehensive) pesticide analyses were not conducted.
Field test kits to assess pesticide exposure (cholinesterase depression) should be provided at health care centers near major agricultural operations and a state funding mechanism is needed to test blood and urine in unusual, acute pesticide episodes.
Samples could be tested at mainland laboratories, including CDC.
Putting these recommendations into practice as soon as possible would help resolve these ongoing pesticide exposure debates and give greater reassurance to the public.
The JFF report covers the majority of pesticide issues quite well and has valuable recommendations regarding environmental sampling (e.g., testing Kauai west side soils/dusts, air and surface waters) that are worthy of funding and implementation.
With data, definitive conclusions can be drawn about risks or lack of risks to public health and local ecology.
Without the data, debate and speculation will continue for years to come.
