http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/nyreg ... oxins.html

December 7, 2005
It's Traditional. It's Religious. It's Poison.
By ANTHONY DePALMA
When Venice Levy had a problem with roaches, she looked for the strongest insecticide she could find. A friend told her about a mystery powder called Tempo.

"When it first came out I bought it. Sure," said Ms. Levy, who runs Botanica Oggun in East Harlem and sells herbs and ornaments used in Hispanic spiritual and religious ceremonies.

She applied Tempo and the pests disappeared. But then her dog, a Shih Tzu named Chi Chi, sniffed the powder and began to foam at the mouth. Tempo contains cyfluthrin, a potent insecticide that can be lethal to dogs, cats and humans. It is legal for licensed applicators to use but illegal when sold on the streets in part because people use it at 200 to 400 times the recommended quantity, figuring that if using a little works well, using a lot will work better.

After a visit to the animal hospital, Chi Chi recovered and went on to live to a ripe old age. Ms. Levy stopped using Tempo.

But Tempo can still be found in parts of New York, despite efforts by city officials to go after the peddlers who sell it. And despite numerous health warnings, surveys done by the city show that Hispanics are much more likely than any other group to use it.

Getting people in the city's ethnic and immigrant communities to reject harmful products like Tempo is a complex and delicate task, touching on culture, language and sometimes religion.

Officials try to balance the benefits of strict enforcement against the danger of offending a large group that is already under economic and social pressures. Sometimes, a ban simply drives hazardous products underground, where they can be even harder to regulate.

Part of what makes this such a daunting environmental and health problem is that the people who are most affected are those who are introducing the hazardous materials into their own homes, usually because they believe that using them will take care of a visible and immediate problem.

That is why Miguel Gomez's family followed a peculiar ritual before sitting down to supper in their basement apartment in the Bronx. His mother, Myrtha, would crawl under the dinner table and draw a line around its underside with a piece of special white chalk.

"She wanted to make sure that cockroaches didn't crawl up the table while we were eating," said Mr. Gomez, now 18. "It worked." It sure did. Although it looked like ordinary blackboard chalk, Mrs. Gomez was actually using a powerful unlicensed insecticide called Chinese Chalk or Miraculous Chalk. Imported in small orange boxes, it sold for about a dollar in Chinatown, East Harlem and the South Bronx.

It was toxic to bugs that crossed it, and was widely used in China and Latin America because it was so effective. But it was not approved for use in homes here because it contained deltamethrin, which is highly toxic. Two years ago the New York police arrested a number of people for selling Chinese Chalk and warnings about its dangers went up throughout the city.

The efforts appear to have been successful. Mr. Gomez has not seen Chinese Chalk in his neighborhood for a few years, and a recent afternoon spent looking for it in Chinatown proved futile.

But many other hazardous products are still out there. Warnings have gone out in recent years about a pesticide from Mexico called Tres Pasitos, which means three little steps in Spanish. It contains aldicard, which is highly toxic to pests and humans. Rats that nibble on it are said to take three steps and die.

Nine cases of Tres Pasitos poisoning were reported to the New York City Poison Control Center in the last year. Most of the incidents are believed to involve young children who touched the powder on the floor of their homes and then ingested it.

Families living in substandard housing are tempted to use the strongest product they can find. Jessica Leighton, deputy commissioner of New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the city often has to enlist a local group that has already established special bonds with a community to help get the word out about risky products.

A few years ago, small plastic bags containing a peach-colored powder called litargirio began showing up on city streets. It was made in the Dominican Republic, where it has been used for years as an underarm deodorant and burn remedy. Samples of it contained up to 80 percent lead. It cannot be absorbed through the skin, but any that gets on the hands can be ingested.

City officials asked the Alianza Dominicana, a large advocacy and social services group representing Dominicans, to spread the word about the risks of using litargirio. But Moises Perez, executive director of the Alianza, said getting people to stop using it took a lot of effort, even among his own staff.

"They said to me, 'Moises, I grew up with that stuff. My mother used it all the time,' " Mr. Perez said. The organization's workers had to be convinced that something as familiar to them as litargirio was dangerous before they would tell other people not to use it.

No hazard has stirred more sustained controversy than the ritualistic use of mercury in some Afro-Caribbean religions. The practice was first publicized by Arnold P. Wendroff, a former public school teacher, who in 1989 asked his junior high school students in Brooklyn how mercury was used.

One student answered that his mother sprinkled mercury on their apartment floor to ward off bad spirits. Mercury vapors can cause developmental problems.

"The government has known about this for a long time," said Dr. Wendroff, 64, who has a Ph.D. in the sociology of medicine. "There needs to be a response plan and there isn't one."

It is not illegal to sell mercury in New York, but packages have to be properly labeled. In response to Dr. Wendroff's urging, the city has monitored mercury sales in botanicas, conducted air sampling in the shops, and distributed pamphlets about the dangers of mercury, known on the street as azogue (ah-ZOH-gay).

No one knows with certainty how great a threat ritual mercury represents. In one of the most comprehensive investigations, Dr. Philip O. Ozuah of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx found that 38 of 41 botanicas he checked in 1995 sold mercury in small vials without warning labels, suggesting that the metal was widely available in the borough.

But tests on a large group of children from the Bronx a few years later showed that only 3 percent of them had elevated mercury levels in their urine, where elemental mercury exposure would be detected.

Dr. Ozuah, now interim chairman of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, said he had to conclude at this point that ritual mercury was not a serious problem. He said the most common way it was used - contained in a good luck amulet - posed no harm.

Mercury can be hard to find now. Ms. Levy, the botanica owner in East Harlem, said she had never sold mercury, but she is certain that those who use it can find other places to buy it, or bring it in from another country.

Eric Canales, an ordained Santeria priest, said that even if some sects used mercury in rituals, their numbers were too small to warrant the aggressive crackdown that Dr. Wendroff advocated.

"To blatantly say that because you have a huge Latino population you think there is a huge problem with mercury is prejudiced, inflammatory and ignorant," Mr. Canales said.

Dr. Wendroff says there is nothing pejorative about making sure that mercury is sold with the proper labeling. Leaders in the Latino community reject his ideas, he says, "because they are embarrassed about the bad name it gives to the community."