Proposals Debated to Update EPA’s Pesticide Standards : Health: The two measures would provide new tolerance levels. Children are especially at risk of overexposure to chemicals, a report says.

WASHINGTON —  Armed with a new report which says that current practices place children at risk of overexposure to agricultural pesticides, lawmakers have begun debating two proposals to overhaul the Environmental Protection Agency’s tolerance standards.

Both bills seek to give the EPA workable pesticide standards. Laws passed as early as the 1950s set tolerance levels for pesticides on processed foods at zero. But modern equipment can detect residues that previously could not be detected, thus making many processed foods in violation of the older laws.

At a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said the report by the National Academy of Science “gives strong support” to legislation that he and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) introduced last February.

The Kennedy-Waxman bill would prohibit the sale of foods with pesticide residues unless the health risk from those residues is “negligible” over a person’s lifetime. According to the study, most health risks from pesticide exposure, including cancer and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease, accumulate over a lifetime of exposure and often develop decades after initial contact.

The second measure was introduced by Rep. Richard H. Lehman (D-North Fork). He told the committee that he believes his food quality bill is better because it gives the EPA “the flexibility needed” to adjust tolerance standards as technology for detecting pesticide residue improves.

The report, “Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children,” was produced by a team of scientists and doctors appointed by the National Academy of Sciences. The study, commissioned by Congress, examines the policies of federal agencies, including the EPA, in regulating pesticides in foods consumed by infants and children.

The report found that current EPA policies do not adequately account for the effects of toxic pesticides on children, which are more pronounced than on adults.

Children often suffer greater risk of exposure to pesticide residues because they consume more food per unit of body weight than adults, the study said, and far fewer types of foods than adults. Further, because children’s organs and nervous and immune systems are still developing, they may be more susceptible to damage.

Most data used by the EPA fail to consider these particular vulnerabilities of children, the report said. Measurement practices tend to focus on foods eaten by adults and do not account for the pesticides children encounter through non-dietary sources including water, air and soil.

Discussing the report Tuesday with Agriculture Committee members, Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician who chaired the research team that produced the report, stressed that health problems caused by exposure to pesticides may not be apparent for decades.

Because the number of brain cells decreases as humans age, a child whose cells were damaged at an early age may not show symptoms for years. “When today’s child is 60 years old, that child may not have enough neurons to sustain thought,” Landrigan said.

Still, he and his colleagues said, the report “should not be a cause for alarm,” and that children need to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

“The goal of our report is to make the very good food supply of the United States even better,” Landrigan said. “We are not saying that parents should rush out and radically change their children’s diets to avoid certain foods.”

The sponsors of the two food safety bills tried to align their legislative efforts with findings and recommendations of the report.

Lehman said that many of the recommendations are addressed by the Food Quality Protection Act of 1993, which he is co-sponsoring with Reps. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) and J. Roy Rowland (D-Ga.).

Both bills would establish standards for “negligible risk” but differ on who would define those standards.

The Kennedy-Waxman bill defines a negligible risk as “an amount of pesticide chemical or residue on foods that is not likely to have adverse human health effects” and sets a maximum allowable lifetime chance of developing a health risk like cancer at one in a million. The Lehman bill would defer the “complexity of risk assessment” to the EPA.

The Kennedy-Waxman bill would end EPA’s practice of weighing health risks against benefits of pesticides to farmers; the Lehman measure would not.