Utah Man on Trial for 2 Sisters' Deaths Due to Pesticide Spraying

Utah Man on Trial for 2 Sisters' Deaths Due to Pesticide Spraying

It was a fateful day last February when Nathan and Brenda Toone called in Bergman Pest and Lawn Inc. to deal with a rodent problem in their yard. Three days later, both their children, Rebecca, 4, and Rachel, 15 months, were dead.

The horrific tragedy is back in the news now, a year later, as prosecutors recently set a May 2011 date for the trial of Coleman Nocks. He is the licensed technician who is accused of applying too much of the pesticide, Fumitoxin, too close to the house and, in a "negligent homicide," causing the girls' deaths. Soil moisture mixed with Fumitoxin pellets forms a poison gas, which in this case prosecutors say wafted into fissures in the house foundation and then into Rebecca's and Rachel's lungs.

In the wake of the deaths last year, it was clear that an action response was needed to prevent this disaster from ever happening again. And indeed federal regulators did take action: Last April, U.S. EPA banned Fumitoxin for use in residential areas and created a wider "buffer zone" for use away from buildings in non-residential areas.

But the resurgence of the story has one area activist again thinking harder about what more could be done.

In light of the Layton deaths, Victoria Sethunya, of Salt Lake City, Utah, has started a petition on Change.org asking that the Utah Department of Health do more to protect residents–especially renters and tenants—from the risks of pesticide poisoning.

Sethunya, who is from the African country of Lesotho, says she was once a member of a volunteer forensic pharmacology team at a set of health clinics in Lesotho, where she studied the nature of local poison and advised doctors and nurses who needed immediate emergency response information to poisoning episodes.

"Living in Utah, I have been in many places, nursing homes, schools, offices and public housing, where someone will show up with a hose and start spraying without any notice whatsover to those around poisoned environments. The death of the girls in Utah was the result of our negligence in handling poisons and we need to change," she told Change.org.

Her petition asks that the Utah Department of Health legally require that landlords provide health and safety information sheets (known as MSDS sheets) to residents of a property before a spraying either inside or outside. She says this will reduce response time in case of an accidental poisoning. She also asks that the Health Department set up a "help line" to give immediate assistance to tenants who notice landlords spraying pesticides without prior notice.

I'm not an expert in Utah laws, but this is a fair "ask" as far as I can tell. For example, the organization Healthy Child, Healthy World says on its website that "tenant rights" laws can vary widely from state-to-state, and in some places are non-existent. The group has a page dedicated to tenant advocacy that concludes that laws offer "meager protections" for tenants and condo owners trying to avoid pesticide exposure.

That's why Sethunya writes: "No one should wait to be poisoned...If we cannot learn from the death of a child, how else can we learn?"

If you own a home, like the Toone couple, you should always ask to see the MSDS sheets of a pesticide before you allow a spraying, just in case of an accident. To protect renters, you can sign Sethunya's petition to the Utah Department of Health here.

http://environment.change.org/blog/view/utah_man_on_trial_for_2_sisters_deaths_due_to_pesticide_spraying