Are you sure?

Atrazine is the most commonly used herbicide both in the United States and worldwide, but scientists and environmentalists have raised serious concerns about its safety for both the environment and people. Among other things, atrazine has been shown to cause major problems in frogs.

• U.S. environmentalists, led by Natural Resources Defense Council, recently lost a major lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking EPA to ban atrazine and investigate the leading atrazine manufacturer, Syngenta, for an alleged cover-up of its studies on the risks of the chemical.
• The European Union and parts of Australia recently banned the chemical.
• Practically every other democratic and industrialized country in the world recently has banned, limited or considered limiting its use.

Dr. Tyrone Hayes, an ACA Board Member and professor and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley has conducted research that connected atrazine with sexual abnormalities in frogs. His research showed that:

• Atrazine stimulates the enzyme aromatase, which induces the male hormone testosterone to become a form of the female hormone estrogen.
• When this occurs at certain crucial stages in a frog's development, males often develop extra testes and/or testes that produce egg cells as well as sperm cells.
• Even levels of atrazine 1/30th that of the U.S. legal limit can produce sexual abnormalities in amphibians.
• These abnormalities often lead to greatly shortened life spans for the affected frogs.

Although atrazine has been shown to be dangerous, some people claim that it should not be banned. They point out that:

• Male frogs with female characteristics have been documented since the 1920s, decades before the introduction of atrazine.
• Perhaps scientists are just beginning to realize how widespread this phenomenon is in the wild.
• It isn't necessarily true that atrazine began causing these problems after over forty years of widespread use.
• Other factors may be at work.
• There are many species of frogs, such as the leopard frog, that are thriving in atrazine-contaminated areas.

Notwithstanding these questions, scientists retort that the evidence demonstrating the dangers of atrazine is strong.

"The results are pretty stunning, and they have lots of implications. There's no reason to think that this is going to be limited to frogs. Other, related phenomena might happen in other organisms because there's no reason to think that frogs are special."
-Dr. David B. Wake, University of California, Berkeley