03/11/08 Getting the Wrong Information

Getting the Wrong Information. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Each day we hear, read or watch reports about things that affect us. Many of those reports are about our health and the things that affect it. The subject of pesticides comes up all too often and after a recent report in a Seattle newspaper about levels of pesticides found in test subjects, toxicologist Bob Kreiger got angry. KREIGER: The relationship between the biomarker measurement in the urine and a harmful level, there is just no connection there and these guys made it sound like by measuring the biomarker they had revealed hazard and they clearly had not. What they found was not harmful pesticides in everyday food products. Finding a biomarker only means that you were exposed to a pesticide, nothing about the level of exposure. Kreiger will be speaking to lettuce growers in Arizona later this week on the same issue and puts things into perspective. KREIGER: The residue level measured was 40 parts per billion on lettuce. The average serving of lettuce that a human eats is 72 grams. To get to the "no effect level" of asiphate, the pesticide which is the most toxic one that's used on lettuce, you've got to eat 2000 servings of lettuce. That means you've got to eat about 6 cases of lettuce a day to get to the "no effect level." To get to a toxic level would be a much greater amount. There may some that will say that that is lettuce, not apples, cherries, strawberries etc. Kreiger says: KREIGER: Apples would be the same way. I do a lot of work with strawberries and that's a real interesting one because the amount of strawberries you'd have to eat to get to the no-effect level of strawberries, you'd overdose on the vitamin C, you'd be blinded by the methanol that's in the strawberries and you'd be drunk on your a** from the ethanol. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.