Deadline Nears for State Pesticide Notification List

Dec. 31 was the deadline to sign up for Connecticut Pesticide Pre-Notification Registry, which requires lawn and tree care firms to notify people who sign up if they are applying pesticides to neighboring properties.

"Pesticides are designed to be toxic. If it's an insecticide, it's designed to kill insects; if it's an herbicide, it's designed to kill weeds . . . These things do have health effects," said Nancy Alderman, president of Environment & Human Health Inc., an environmental advocacy group at Yale University.

"The reason why the registry is important is because you can get your children and pets in the house before they apply pesticides, especially when they spray" trees, she said.

Under the law, homeowners on the registry must be given advance notice before insecticide, fungicide or herbicide is applied outdoors to an adjacent property by a lawn or tree care business.

Homeowners who spread or spray their own pesticides do not have to notify neighbors on the registry.

The law does not give people the right to stop their neighbors from using pesticides -- only advance notice so they can close windows, bring in pets and warn their children.

Bradford Robinson, the state Department of Environmental Protection's pesticide program supervisor, said the legislature created the registry in 1991. About 250 people sign up for it each year.

Robinson admitted the Dec. 31 deadline for the 2007 growing season may be inconvenient for homeowners concerned about neighbors who hire lawn and tree care firms. It was done that way so the department can give pesticide businesses time to prepare, he said.

"We send the list out to all the pesticide businesses in a big mailing in the spring," Robinson said, noting that the program has been fairly successful in part because "the list has not been so huge."

Alderman and her organization hope to change that -- or at least get people to weigh the health risks of pesticides against the benefits.

Dr. Barry Boyd, a Greenwich oncologist who teaches at Yale Medical School, said that in some cases the benefits of pesticides appear to outweigh the potential health risks.

While the insecticide DDT was banned in the United States for harming certain animal species, those risks are offset in the Third World, where it has saved many people from malaria, Boyd said.

"The real issue for all of us is that there are hundreds and hundreds of pesticides used today that may have a variety of health effects in humans," Boyd said.

Most studies focus on the effect of one pesticide on an organism, but most people receive "multiple pesticides exposures" from a variety of sources, he said.

Evidence suggests lymphoma, bladder cancer, prostate cancer in agricultural workers and childhood leukemia may be related to pesticide exposure, Boyd said.

Use of pesticides in the Northeast is especially high, he said.

"Ironically, we use more than agricultural areas on our golf courses, our lawns," he said. "Farmers in the Midwest don't pour pesticides on their crops."