Poor children fall victim to the war against urban rats

In 2001, the EPA abandoned safety measures that would protect kids.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
NEW YORK -- In the urban warfare against rats, children become casualties, poisoned in greater numbers every year by the toxic pastel pellets scattered like candy around playgrounds, public housing and schools to keep rodents at bay.
The children are victims of the politics of poison control, environmental activists said Saturday, because federal regulators revoked safety controls designed to child-proof the millions of pounds of rat poisons applied nationally every year.
Suit for reinstatement
In New York federal district court Tuesday, an environmental group in Harlem and the Natural Resource Defense Council, or NRDC, in Washington, D.C., filed suit to reinstate federal safety measures that reduce the risk to children from rat poisons. The measures were abandoned in 2001 by the Environmental Protection Agency after consulting with the chemical companies that manufacture the poisons.
"They pulled the safety measures but allowed the rat poisons to stay on the market," said NRDC staff attorney Aaron Colangelo, who prepared the lawsuit. "Since then, the number of reported child poisonings has gone up every year," he said. "We think this is happening across the country."
This past year, more than 50,000 children in the United States age 6 and under were sickened by eating rodent-control toxins, three times as many as were poisoned in the first full year after the safety measures were adopted, according to figures compiled by the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
The harm
The children suffer internal bleeding, bleeding gums and anemia, and can lapse into a coma. Several hundred required hospitalization last year.
Rat poisons harm children in all communities, but poor black and Hispanic children are affected disproportionately, said Peggy Shepard, director of the West Harlem Environmental Action group that filed the lawsuit. The group works with the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health to monitor neighborhood medical issues. In New York state, for example, 57 percent of children hospitalized for rodenticide poisoning are black, though only 16 percent of New York state's population is black; 26 percent of hospitalized children are Hispanic, though Hispanics constitute only 12 percent of the state's population.
"We now feel we have to go to court," Shepard said. "That's our last resort. Children in the community are needlessly getting ill."
EPA officials in Washington would not discuss the lawsuit Friday or explain the why the safety regulations were dropped.
"We are reviewing the complaint and we will respond accordingly," said EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones. She would not elaborate.
Safety measures
According to the lawsuit, the EPA started in 1998 to withhold approval of rat poisons unless manufacturers included two safety measures to protect children: an ingredient that makes the poison taste more bitter and a dye that would make it more obvious when a child ingested the poison. In 2001, however, EPA announced that it "came to a mutual agreement with the rodenticide [manufacturers] to rescind the bittering agent and indicator dye requirements."
Nowhere in the United States is the problem of rat control thought to be more acute than in the maze of Manhattan.
Estimates of how many rats make New York their home vary from as few as 500,000 to as many as 44 million. Most experts suggest there may be one rat for each of the city's 8 million residents.
Getting worse
Complaints about rodents have increased 40 percent in the past two years, according to the city health department, and the city exterminated 84,000 rats at a cost of $13 million during the last 12 months.
Throughout the city, rat poisons are used heavily in public housing, public schools and city parks. Householders usually buy rat poison in child-proof containers, but cost-conscious government agencies often buy the poison in bulk as drum-loads of loose pellets.
In a single year, about 800 pounds of rat poison were used in the General Grant Houses, a public housing project that is home to 4,500 people in West Harlem. The same rat poisons were used in nearby Morningside Park, as well as in the two neighborhood elementary schools.
As a result, children living in the General Grant Houses -- and likely in other areas of the city -- may be exposed to these rat poisons literally wherever they go: at home, at school and in local parks.