The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday issued an emergency order to stop the use of a pesticide that can harm fetuses — the agency’s first such move in almost 40 years.
The herbicide, called dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate (also known as DCPA or Dacthal), is used to control weeds on a variety of crops, including broccoli, onions, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and strawberries.
But when a pregnant woman is exposed to the chemical, it can cause changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels, the EPA said. That can have lasting consequences for the child, including low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ and impaired motor skills later in life, according to the agency’s announcement.
Those risks prompted the EPA to use its authority to suspend the use of the pesticide.
“DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately,” Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement.
The emergency order is effective immediately.
“It’s EPA’s job to protect people from exposure to dangerous chemicals,” Freedhoff said in the statement. “In this case, pregnant women who may never even know they were exposed could give birth to babies that experience irreversible lifelong health problems.”
DCPA has been banned in the European Union since 2009.
Mily Treviño Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national organization of women farmworkers, called the EPA’s decision “historic.”
“As an organization led by farmworker women, we know intimately the harm that pesticides, including dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate (DCPA or Dacthal), can inflict on our bodies and communities,” Sauceda said in a statement. “This emergency decision is a great first step that we hope will be in a series of others that are based on listening to farmworkers, protecting our reproductive health, and safeguarding our families.”
The suspension came after more than a decade of back-and-forth between the EPA and the sole manufacturer of DCPA, the AMVAC Chemical Corporation.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2013, the EPA said it had requested data on the weedkiller and its health impacts from AMVAC, and specifically asked for a comprehensive study on the effects of DCPA on thyroid development in adults and children before and after birth.
The EPA later said AMVAC had submitted several studies from 2013 to 2021, but the agency considered the data to be insufficient, and some of the requests, including the thyroid study, were never received. AMVAC ultimately submitted the thyroid study in August 2022.
The EPA’s recent review of DCPA was part of a process in which registered pesticides are re-analyzed every 15 years to make sure they have no adverse health effects and are not harmful to the environment.
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