Contact us at letters time. But Is It Safe? By Markham Heid. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again.
Sign Up Now. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies.
You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Thank you! In , we completed an interim review of DEET under the Registration Review Program to ensure that it continues to meet safety standards based on current scientific knowledge.
The Agency has not identified any risks of concern to human health, non-target species or the environment. View this interim registration review decision www. We continue to believe that the normal use of DEET does not present a health concern to the general population, including children.
As always, consumers are advised to read and follow label directions in using any pesticide product, including insect repellents. Currently registered uses of DEET are also not expected to result in adverse effects for listed and non-listed endangered species, or critical habitat.
The human health risk assessment concluded that there are no risks of concern because no toxic effects have been identified when used as a dermally applied insect repellent, and there is no dietary or occupational exposure for DEET. DEET's most significant benefit is its ability to repel potentially disease-carrying insects and ticks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC receives more than 30, reports of Lyme disease transmitted by deer ticks and reports of La Crosse encephalitis virus transmitted by mosquitoes annually.
Each of these diseases can cause serious health problems or even death in the case of encephalitis. Where these diseases are prevalent, the CDC recommends use of insect repellents when out-of-doors. View more information on specific products and their protection times. FIFRA requires that pesticides be used according to the approved label. It has been commercially available since and has since become commonplace. Deet is a true repellent: It protects not by killing mosquitoes or other insects but by preventing them from landing on skin or clothing in the first place.
How exactly the chemical achieves this feat has been a bit of a mystery to scientists. More recent research suggests a different, simpler explanation: The compound just smells incredibly bad to most bugs, so much so that they avoid all contact with it. The balance of evidence indicates that deet is safe when used as directed. There are a few things to keep in mind when considering reports to the contrary:.
The overall incidence of deet poisoning is very low. In the Environmental Protection Agency conducted a definitive assessment of the chemical. The agency turned up 46 seizures and four deaths that were potentially linked to deet exposure. It estimated that since , the incidence of seizures with a potential link to deet exposure was one per million uses. Most of those reported cases involved a misuse of deet products. The agency concluded that when consumers followed product-label instructions and took reasonable precautions, the health risks of deet essentially vanished.
A vast majority of cases of deet toxicity are mild. In another seminal analysis , researchers looked at more than 9, calls made to poison control centers between and They found that nearly 90 percent of the injuries were treated at home, and that of those people referred to health centers, 80 percent were discharged after an examination.
A second analysis of more than 20, calls made between and found similar results. There is no reliable evidence that deet causes cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animal studies have not found an increase in tumors in research subjects who were given oral deet tablets or who had liquid deet applied to their skin. A Swedish study did find that men who used insect repellent for days or longer faced an increased risk of developing testicular cancer.
A majority of repellents contained deet at the time of the study. But the CDC says that the study was flawed and that the results were not conclusive. It was this question that first triggered widespread deet-aversion among consumers. Between the early s and late s, 14 cases of potentially deet-related encephalopathy brain damage were reported in the medical literature, all but one of them in children who were 8 or younger.
Three of those children died; the remaining 11 recovered fully. The reports triggered a wave of fear among consumers that has yet to fully abate. But the link between the chemical and sickness was never conclusively proved, in part because not nearly enough information was reported for epidemiologists to discern between deet exposure and other potential causes such as infections in those cases.
Any chemical poses some risk, especially when misused. But experts seem to agree that 14 is a vanishingly small number of incidents when compared with the estimated million annual human applications of deet made during that same time period. Other research indicates that contrary to conventional wisdom, children are no more susceptible to deet toxicity than adults.
For example, the study that analyzed 20, poison control center calls between and found that infants and children actually accounted for a greater proportion of cases with no or moderate effects, while adults accounted for a greater proportion of the cases with moderate and major effects.
For example, at least one study found that when pregnant rats were exposed to high doses of deet, their offspring had low birth weights. At least three women who used deet during pregnancy gave birth to babies with severe birth defects, and at least one of those babies died. But there are some important caveats to keep in mind when considering that information.
First, the dose the rodents received was much higher than any normal human dose, and those findings about low birth weight were not replicated in other rat studies.
0コメント