Appeals court tells EPA to ban pesticide or decide it's safe

A federal appeals court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to quickly determine whether a pesticide linked to brain damage in children should be banned

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Thursday ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to quickly determine whether a pesticide linked to brain damage in children should be banned, saying the agency had delayed acting on the widely used bug-killer chlorpyrifos for nearly 14 years. In a 2-1 decision, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to act on a possible ban within 60 days. “The EPA has spent more than a decade assembling a record of chlorpyrifos’s ill effects,″ U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote. “Yet, rather than ban the pesticide or reduce the tolerances to levels that the EPA can find are reasonably certain to cause no harm, the EPA has sought to evade, through one delaying tactic after another, its plain statutory duties.″ Rakoff and U.S. Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen ordered the EPA to decide within 60 days whether the pesticide is safe, including for infants and children, or ban it.