Melamine from Pesticide in Baby Food

Here's another reason that industrial agricultural chemicals need more extensive testing than they get now; because even if they don't stay around as persistent organic pollutants, their breakdown products may be toxic:

... Chemists with Health Canada in Ottawa report they have yet to identify the source of the pollutant they’ve just turned up in 71 of 94 samples of infant formula. In a report of their findings, however, just published online ahead of print in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Sheryl Tittlemier and her colleagues do finger one key suspect: the insecticide cyromazine. It's legal for use on food crops and animal forage — and melamine is one of its breakdown products. ...

The article goes on to note that traces of contamination are very low, below the allowable 'safe' dosages of contaminant. And how are those determined? I refer again to Dr. Sandra Steingraber's 1997 work, "Living Downstream," emphasis mine:

... In 1993, the National Research Council concluded that the current regulatory arrangement permits pesticide levels in food that are too high for children and infants. Tolerances are insufficiently protective, according to the council's report, for two basic reasons. First, they are not based solely or even primarily on health considerations. The actual values chosen as legal limits reflect the results of field trials designed to measure the highest residue concentrations likely under normal agricultural practice.

Second, the safety margins supposedly ensured by tolerances assume adult eating habits. However, children eat far fewer types of food in proportionally greater quantities. A nonnursing infant consumes fifteen times more pears than the average adult, for example. And pears, as we have seen, are one of the most heavily sprayed fruits on the market. Children also differ sharply in their ability to activate, detoxify, and excrete contaminants. Finally, childhood exposures to pesticides may lead to greater risks of cancer and immune dysfunction than exposures later in life.

... Rachel Carson once remarked how strange it was to live in an age where carcinogens were a basic element of our system of food production. This is still a strange notion. ...

Just, remember that every single time you hear someone talking about contamination being less than the legal limit.

Those limits, as Steingraber points out in her book, don't account for cross-chemical interations any more than they're really set with health concerns in mind. Nor, as she says, is there anywhere in the world a control group of humans who haven't been heavily exposed to industrial contaminants that our bodies didn't evolve to deal with. She describes our carcinogen-heavy lifestyle as a large, uncontrolled experiment on all of us.

And the chemical industries still don't want to have to prove that their products are safe before they go in our food, in our children's food, or wind up in high concentrations in breast milk.

Just eat it anyway, they say. Just try it. What could possibly go wrong?

Reckless jerks, the lot of them.

(Photo credit: whitneybee on Flickr.)