Atrazine litigation in Madison County
I'm quoted in a Legal Newsline piece about Baron & Budd and Korein Tillery class actions in Madison County over alleged seepage of the pesticide atrazine into the country's water supplies. The suits seem meritless: “if a 150-pound adult drank literally thousands of gallons of water with atrazine at three parts-per-billion every day for 70 years, she still would not reach the exposure level at which no adverse impact has been detected in the laboratory.” The EPA just re-registered the herbicide in 2006 after a twelve-year review of 6000 studies showing no evidence of carcinogenic effect, and the three-parts-per-billion safety standard has a thousand-fold safety factor. The effects on agriculture and the economy if the lawsuits succeeded would be enormous; a huge chunk of the country's grain production is reliant on atrazine to maximize yields. A study by a University of Chicago economist, Don Coursey, found that there would be 21,000 to 46,000 jobs lost; one presumes food prices would rise substantially if we lose $2 billion of crop yields. That's not just the US economy at stake
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Atrazine litigation in Madison County