New laws rewrite rules on pesticides....

On Aug. 3, President Clinton signed into law environmental legislation designed to get around some inflexible language in the nation's primary food safety law. The controversial measure had prohibited residues of cancer-causing pesticides in processed foods if the residues were more concentrated in the final product than in the raw ingredients-even if the amounts in question posed no demonstrable health risk.

This portion of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, known as the Delaney clause, dates back to 1958, when technologies for detecting carcinogens picked up only gross contamination. As analytical methods improved, traces of pesticides began showing up more routinely-though often at levels below those considered to pose risks. This was especially true in many processed foods, such as oils extracted from seeds, which by their very nature require a concentrating of raw ingredients.

In the late 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to cope with the problem by allowing elevated pesticide residues in processed foods when the amounts posed a "negligible" cancer risk. This policy lasted only a few years, however-until a federal court ruled that EPA had no authority to interpret the law this way (SN: 5/15/93, p. 311).

Congress has now offered a permanent solution, instructing EPA to set identical pesticide residue limits for raw and processed foods. Moreover, the new Food Quality Protection Act says this strategy must be applied to setting pesticide limits to cope with all health risks, not just cancer.

The new law also directs EPA to consider the increased susceptibility of infants and children to certain health risks when it sets these pesticide residue limits-thereby addressing what the National Academy of Sciences had argued was a major flaw in the old law (SN: 7/3/93, p. 4).

Finally, the new act requires that within 2 years, EPA must develop a program to test pesticides for hormone-mimicking properties, to implement this program by 1999, and to report on its progress to Congress a year later. An agency briefing paper on the new law notes that this research program is "a high priority for EPA." It also acknowledges that Congress has assigned it "a very ambitious schedule," considering how little is known about the way pesticides emulate hormones (SN: 7/15/95, p. 44) or about the potential for synergy between environmental hormones (SN: 6/8/96, p. 356).