Students at the University of California, Berkeley, which has been offering a certified-organic cafeteria for many years. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
By Corey Binns
When Ángel García was little, he often awoke to the smell of breakfast burritos on the stove. His mom would wake up at 4 a.m. to cook for him and pack his lunch before dropping him off with the babysitter by 6 a.m. so she could get to work. She spent her days picking fruits and vegetables on the farmland surrounding their California home. When she returned at the end of a long day, García remembers rushing to her for a hug, but she would shoo him away. She would remind him that chemicals misted down into the fields where she worked — what kind she didn't know, but she recognized the dangers they posed to her son's health.
California will ban a brain-damaging pesticide that the Trump administration's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has delayed banning at the national level, the state announced Wednesday.
American farmers use chlorpyrifos, a pesticide tied to brain and nervous system issues, on crops such as apples, broccoli, corn and strawberries. Stephanie Chapman / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
By Jessica Corbett
In a ruling welcomed by public health advocates, a federal court on Friday ordered the Trump administration to stop stalling a potential ban on a pesticide linked to brain damage in children, giving regulators until mid-July to make a final decision.
Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate that comes from the same chemical family as sarin nerve gas, is used on foods such as strawberries. bluecinema / Getty Images
Health and labor organizations will have to argue again in court that chlorpyrifos, a brain-damaging pesticide, must be banned from all food uses, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday. The decision comes four months after Andrew Wheeler's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked the court to rehear the case either by the three-judge panel that originally banned chlorpyrifos in 2018, or by a panel of 11 judges.
A groundbreaking new study in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that you can cut your cancer risk by eating an organic diet. The findings are dramatic. In a study that followed nearly 70,000 people, those who ate the most organic food lowered their overall risk of developing cancer by 25 percent. The relationship was strongest for two types of cancer: participants who frequently ate organic had 76 percent fewer lymphomas and 34 percent fewer breast cancers that developed after menopause.
The White House's just-released list of planned environmental and public health rollbacks includes letting high-school-age kids spray brain-damaging pesticides on commercial farms.
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Trump administration is appealing a federal court ruling that ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide tied to brain damage and other health problems in children.
In August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the EPA must ban the pesticide within 60 days based on strong scientific evidence that chlorpyrifos—which is applied on dozens of fruit, nut and vegetable crops—is unsafe for public health.
In a scathing opinion, a federal court on Thursday ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide linked to brain damage in children.
The ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals nullified the decision last year by then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to cancel the agency's proposal to ban chlorpyrifos—an insecticide that in small doses can harm children's brains and nervous systems—from use on food crops.
Conservation and public health groups sued the Trump administration and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt on Wednesday for failing to protect endangered wildlife and the environment from the dangerous pesticide malathion.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have failed to complete the legally required steps to fully assess and limit the dangers of the neurotoxin.
