The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking the first steps to ban the sale of 12 D-Con mouse and rat poison products produced by Reckitt Benckiser because they fail to comply with current EPA safety standards.
About 10,000 children a year are accidentally exposed to mouse and rat baits, and EPA has worked with companies to ensure that products are both safe to use around children and effective for consumers, EPA said in a statement. Reckitt Benckiser, the British maker of D-Con brand products, is the only producer of poisons that has refused to adopt EPA’s safety standards for all of its consumer use products.
“Moving forward to ban these products will prevent completely avoidable risks to children, said James Jones, acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. “With this action, EPA is ensuring that the products on the market are both safe and effective for consumers.”
“D-con believes that EPA’s announcement today puts the public health of millions of American families at risk. We are deeply concerned that the EPA is trying to restrict access to essential safeguards that protect our families and our children from the serious public health dangers associated with rodent infestation. D-con has been committed to developing products that protect public health for more than 50 years. We will vigorously challenge EPA’s actions to ensure that these effective and affordable rodent control products remain available to consumers to protect their homes and families for generations to come,” said Hal Ambuter, Director of Regulatory and Government Affairs for d-CON. (This reply of course is a non-answer because it does not address the issue of childproof packaging. AutoInformed has asked for clarification.)
EPA claimed it has worked with a number of companies during the last five years to develop safer rodent control products that are effective, affordable, and widely available. Examples of products meeting EPA safety standards include Bell Laboratories’ Tomcat products, PM Resources’ Assault brand products and Chemsico’s products.
EPA requires rodent poisons to be contained in protective tamper-resistant bait stations and prohibits pellets and other bait forms that cannot be secured in bait stations. In addition, the EPA prohibits the sale to residential consumers of products containing brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone, and difenacoum because of their toxicity to wildlife.
For companies that have complied with the new standards in 2011, EPA has received no reports of children being exposed to bait contained in bait stations. EPA expects to see a substantial reduction in exposures to children when the 12 D-Con products that do not comply with current standards are removed from the consumer market as millions of households use these products each year.
The EPA’s final Notice of Intent to Cancel will be available in the EPA docket EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0049 at www.regulations.gov. After Federal Register publication of the Notice of Intent to Cancel, Reckitt Benckiser will have 30 days to request a hearing before an EPA Administrative Law Judge. If a hearing is not requested, the cancellations become final and effective.
For a complete list of the homeowner use rat and mouse products that meet the EPA’s safety standards, visit http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/mice-and-rats/rodent-bait-station.html.
