Atrazine Litigation Facts

In July and August of 2004, law firms based in Missouri and Texas filed a series of class action complaints in Madison County, Illinois, on behalf of the Holiday Shores Sanitary District, a local water utility.

These are identical “cookie cutter” suits filed against Syngenta and five other corporations that manufacture, formulate or market products containing atrazine. Growmark, a distributor of agricultural products located in Madison County, is named co-defendant in all the lawsuits—providing a basis for the suits to be brought in the county called a “judicial hellhole” by the American Tort Reform Association.

The lawsuits make a series of false allegations about atrazine, using a handful of questionable studies to justify claims that the EPA standard for atrazine in drinking water (3 parts per billion) is not protective of human health. The suits seek class-action remedies and a wide variety of financial penalties including payment for the charcoal water filtering system that Holiday Shores Sanitary District has had in operation for more than a decade. Yet, Holiday Shores certifies to both the state and federal EPAs—and its customers—that its drinking water meets the stringent safety standards of these agencies.

So, Holiday Shores Sanitary District supplies residents with drinking water that meets strict federal and state safety standards. At the same time, the District is suing atrazine manufacturers on the basis that the water is unsafe, even as it continues to sell the water to its customers. Summed up, Holiday Shores Sanitary District is asking for a quality of water it acknowledges it already has.

This lawsuit flies in the face of good regulatory policy, good science and good common sense.

Regulatory policy: The US Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for evaluating possible human health and environmental effects of pesticides, and for setting and enforcing standards to guide their use. In the case of atrazine, EPA has just completed a comprehensive, science-based, 10-year safety review and recommended its continued use in agriculture.

One of the standards set by EPA is for the presence of a substance in drinking water, called a Maximum Contamination Level (MCL). EPA has set an MCL for atrazine of 3 parts per billion (ppb). In an abundance of caution, this MCL has a 1,000 fold safety factor—in other words, the standard is set 1,000 times higher than a level found to produce no negative effects in laboratory studies. This means that a 150-pound adult could drink 21,000 gallons of water with 3 ppb of atrazine a day for 70 years and still not get enough atrazine to cause adverse health effects.

State EPAs can adopt this very conservative federal EPA standard or set tougher standards of their own. Illinois and 48 other states have adopted the federal MCL for atrazine (only the state of California chose a different standard).

The Holiday Shores lawsuit ignores the long-standing drinking water standard for atrazine and makes broad, unsubstantiated health claims linked to any detectible level of the herbicide. IF a jury awards damages in this case, it will set a precedent for financially-driven, local litigation to override the science-based judgment of EPA—and indeed any regulatory agency in the US.

Science: In support of its counts, the lawsuit relies upon scientific research which has not passed the litmus test of sound science: the ability to repeat results with scientific and statistical confidence. It frequently cites a 2002 study by Dr. Tyrone Hayes that claims atrazine affects the sexual development of frogs. But in fact, EPA, in a public address to the Minnesota Legislature in February 2005, said “Dr. Hayes claims not only has his laboratory repeated his findings many times in his experiments with thousands of frogs, but that other scientists have also replicated his results. EPA, however, has never seen either the results from any independent investigator published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or the raw data from Dr. Hayes’ additional experiments that confirm Dr. Hayes’ conclusions.”

Further, a special Scientific Advisory Panel convened by EPA concluded “there are currently insufficient data” to confirm the theory that atrazine exposure may impact frog development.

The frog studies are only a few grains of the mountain of atrazine studies EPA says it has on file: nearly 6,000. Many of these examine atrazine and its potential to cause cancer. On this issue, EPA has clearly stated atrazine is “not likely” to cause cancer (the most favorable category). The World Health Organization and the National Cancer Institute have also examined the issue and found no cancer concerns.

Common sense: Atrazine has been used safely by farmers for more than 45 years. It is the most popular corn herbicide in the US, and is registered for use in more than 80 countries around the world.

Atrazine helps prevent the number one EPA-ranked cause of pollution in our nation’s waterways: runoff of sediment. It does so as a vital tool in conservation tillage, a farming method used in Madison County and throughout Illinois to reduce soil erosion.

US farmers prefer atrazine over other herbicides because it works better and costs less. Now found in more than 45 pre-mixes in the US, atrazine is the active ingredient most frequently used by manufacturers in combination herbicide products. EPA has estimated that atrazine offers US corn farmers a $28-per-acre advantage over other herbicides due to cost and yield benefits.

The bottom line: We should allow the qualified scientists at EPA—not lawyers seeking financial gain through scare tactics—to determine the regulation of agricultural products, including atrazine.