To anyone whose fear of flying to certain foreign countries is based on the possibility of being sprayed with a pesticide before arrival, first the good news:
The practice, extensively publicized several years ago, has now been largely curtailed, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), which has even seen fit to withdraw as no longer necessary a proposed rule that would have required airline passengers to be told in advance of such “disinsection” to prevent a possible health threat from alien insects.
Largely because of the urging of the DOT and former Transportation Secretary Federico Pena, 20 countries and territories have dropped their requirement that passengers be exposed to a pesticide sprayed while they are on board, leaving only two countries with direct service from the United States–Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago–still upholding the policy, according to a recent press release issued by the agency.
A reality check, however, reveals that although the number of destinations requiring the spraying of inbound flights, usually at the “top of descent,” has indeed diminished, there still remain significant hidden risks of pesticide exposure for many who fly abroad. Among those exposed (barring a change in Australian policy, which now appears highly unlikely) would be anyone heading down to Australia, either now or for the Summer Olympic games in the year 2000–including the athletes themselves.
Although not sprayed directly by a flight attendant wielding a can of insecticide, such passengers, along with the crew, would be spending long hours in aircraft cabins that have been thoroughly saturated with a “residual” spray–that is, one whose chemical residue is designed to linger on surfaces and seat cushions for weeks.
As is now the case with aerosol disinsection sprays, this particular one–applied overseas by U.S. airlines approximately every four weeks–has not been approved for such use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In other instances, spraying while passengers are on board has reportedly continued despite destination countries dropping the requirement, apparently because of bureaucratic snafus involving either intransigent officials or airline confusion.
The DOT, however, either downplayed or overlooked such continuing obstacles when issuing a Feb. 2 news release in which Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater proclaimed the agency’s “four-year effort to halt the spraying of insecticide on aircraft while passengers are on board” to have “achieved dramatic success.”
The release identified six nations–Australia, Barbados, Fiji, Jamaica, New Zealand and Panama–as allowing the spraying of empty planes as an alternative method, and two others with no direct U.S. connections, Kiribati and Madagascar, as still requiring direct in-flight spraying.
Despite the DOT’s attempt to minimize its significance, however, residual spraying is a source of real concern to flight crews and many consumer activists.
According to Linda Laurent, a Houston-based attorney who is part of a legal team representing flight attendants in a class-action lawsuit now pending in Louisiana, both types of pesticides act similarly on a person, but the residual is actually “a lot worse.”
“We are suing the chemical manufacturers, who we feel have a greater responsibility,” Laurent says, adding that the potential number of airline employees involved in the action “could be in the thousands.”
Becky Riley, spokeswoman for the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, says the active ingredient in the residual product–permethrin–is “classified as a possible human carcinogen, in addition to being a nerve poison. The chemical has been shown in animal studies to cause damage to the liver and lungs, and exposure can result in tremors, salivation, vomiting, diarrhea and loss of coordination.”
Deliberately introducing “intentional poisons” of this sort into a confined environment with poor air quality at best, Riley believes, poses “special risks to infants and children, pregnant women, and those with allergies, asthma, chemical sensitivities or weakened immune systems.”
Yet the fact is that even people trying to avoid being exposed to cabin spraying are often unaware of the risk from residuals. A United Airlines spokesman recently noted that he occasionally gets calls from passengers worried about the spray, “but not so much with the residual, because obviously, that’s more transparent to the customer.”
Australia’s insistence that pesticides be used (along with similar mandates in other countries) stems from a basic disagreement with U.S. health officials over the merits of aircraft disinsection. The U.S. abandoned the practice in 1979 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found it to be neither safe for occupants nor a particularly significant means of keeping out any health threat from alien insects; the Aussies continue to believe otherwise.
But while Pena did succeed in persuading a number of foreign governments to officially dispense with their disinsection policies, there is no guarantee that airline passengers can rely on what the DOT was told in every case.
The airlines themselves appear to be either operating under conflicting edicts or failing to communicate with the DOT. An American Airlines representative, for instance, said his airline’s list of destinations calling for the spraying of flights included Argentina and Costa Rica–two more countries that were supposed to have dropped the requirement.
Nor were all international disinsection requirements addressed by the DOT’s efforts to end the practice, as some countries have continued to require spraying of aircraft arriving from locales other than the U.S. (as noted on a DOT Web site).
In the meantime, the airlines have found various ways of coping with the EPA’s ban on the use of several dozen insecticides for the disinsection of occupied cabins.
Although manufacturers must now change the products’ labels to prohibit their application to occupied aircraft, some airlines have stockpiled old cans of the Airosol product, which they can legally use to accommodate those countries that still require spraying. Others have turned to using pesticides produced abroad.
But the DOT’s withdrawal of its proposed notification rule means that in order to find out if any chemical is slated to be used on a particular flight, passengers will be left having to either consult the agency’s Web site (ostpxweb.dot.gov/), which lists airline contact sources, or inquire when making reservations–a still less-than-reliable approach.
