ABSTRACT
To professional pesticide users pesticides means a useful tool to do a job: save a farmer's crop from fungus, a homeowner's house from termites, a community from disease-carrying vectors. Although attention has always been periodically focused on pesticides every time there was a health scare — known within Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as "the pesticide of the week syndrome'' — the peak of national concern about the issue seemed to come around 1989, when the apple growth regulator Alar was the topic of a "60 Minutes" broadcast — twice — and actress Meryl Streep performed before an unusually packed Senate hearing to express her concern about feeding apples to her children. One problem with the piecemeal way things get done at the federal level is that rarely does anyone stop and take an overall look at the whole pesticide regulatory program.
