"The consultants, who worked for Dow, the pesticide’s manufacturer, help corporate interests defend their products against environmental and health regulations."
"On a Southern California spring morning in 1973, a tanker truck driver jackknifed his rig and dumped the agricultural fumigant he was transporting onto a city street. A Los Angeles Fire Department emergency response team spent four hours cleaning up the chemical, 1,3-dichloropropene, or 1,3-D, a fumigant sold as Telone that farmers use to kill nematodes and other soil-dwelling organisms before planting.
Seven years after the spill, two emergency responders developed the same rare, aggressive blood cancer—histiocytic lymphoma—and died within two months of each other. In 1975, a farmer who’d accidentally exposed himself to 1,3-D repeatedly through a broken hose was diagnosed with another blood cancer, leukemia, and died the next year.
Within a decade of the men’s deaths, described as case studies in JAMA Internal Medicine, the National Toxicology Program, or NTP, reported “clear evidence” that 1,3-D causes cancer in both rats and mice. The finding led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to classify the chemical as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” the same year, 1985. So it wasn’t a surprise when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles reported in 2003 that Californians who’d lived at least two decades in areas with the highest applications of 1,3-D faced a heightened risk of dying from pancreatic cancer.
Yet EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs’ Cancer Assessment Review Committee, or CARC, concluded in 2019 that 1,3-D—originally embraced by tobacco companies for its unparalleled ability to kill anything in soil that might harm their plants—isn’t likely to cause cancer after all."
Advertisement 
