> Again in complete agreement! 

>> The rare moment when Fischer, Oliver, and Borst are in agreement on something.

Not so fast there....  

> use the Alar example frequently (even last week) when beekeepers ask me about using products in their hives.  

The common misunderstanding was that this was a scare over "nothing",  as the politics and industry PR overwhelmed the science and the facts, even to this day.  

I pollinated apples for over a decade, so I know this one - Alar really was highly toxic, was an actual carcinogen, had not been evaluated at all for safety, and posed tangible risks to youngsters consuming only moderate amounts of apple products.

Alar was really only needed to reduce "drops" that hybridization had eliminated from many common varieties of hybrid apples, as they did not suffer the problem of excessive "drops".  McIntosh and Red Delicious DID suffer from excessive drops, and those growers DID "need" something like Alar.  But Uniroyal sold it to everyone, claiming that it would help all varieties. When EPA first announced that they would ban Alar in 1984, many growers stopped using Alar completely.

But someone arm-twisted EPA into not banning Alar for a few years.   The NRDC and the USA TV show "60 Minutes" story did not mention that Alar was only useful for SOME types of apples, and did not explain the nuance, that Uniroyal was over-selling the chemical to growers who did not need any chemical protection against "drops".

The fact is that apple juice is made mostly from "drops", so apple juice was more likely to have Alar (and higher levels of Alar as a consumed food) than the nation-wide apple "crop" as a whole.

EPA had calculated the hazard of cancer among people exposed to UDMH in Alar for a lifetime - 45 cancers per million, 45 times the one-in-a-million hazard EPA considered "negligible."  But apple juice is consumed far more by kids than grown-ups, so the bulk of this hazard-risk was due to childhood exposure.  If someone kept drinking fruit juices at the same rate as a US child, the fact that most all fruit juices of all types sold by the big food companies are mostly bulk apple juice, flavored with the juice that is promoted on the label (read the BACK label!) would make the 45 per million number higher.

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