A coalition of public interest, environmental health, and farmworker advocacy groups are hailing a decision by a federal appeals court that struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) approval of the medically important antibiotic streptomycin for use on citrus crops.
The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the EPA's amended registration of streptomycin for use as a pesticide against citrus diseases, saying that it did not satisfy the requirements of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and Endangered Species Act (ESA). It also sent the amended registration back to the agency so that it could address the defects.
The EPA in 2018 authorized the spraying of streptomycin, which has been labeled as "critically important" to human medicine by the World Health Organization, to combat citrus greening and citrus canker, diseases that have had devastating impacts on citrus production in Florida. The decision came despite concerns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US lawmakers, and advocacy groups about its potential effect on antibiotic resistance, the environment, and the health of exposed farmworkers.
A lawsuit filed in 2021 by several groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Farmworker Association of Florida, Earthjustice, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, argued that the agency had failed to ensure that the use of streptomycin on citrus trees would not cause unreasonable to human health or the environment.
"The court's decision to vacate the EPA's unlawful approval of streptomycin is a win for public health, pollinators and endangered species," Hannah Connor, a senior attorney and environmental health deputy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a joint press release following the ruling. "I hope that the EPA understands now that it can't just wave away its legal obligations to examine the impacts of the pesticides it approves."
Insufficient assessment of risk to pollinators
Among the arguments made in the lawsuit was that the EPA did not fully assess the risk that use of streptomycin on citrus trees would lead to antibiotic resistance and pose a threat to human health.
The groups estimated that the EPA's approval would have paved the way for 650,000 pounds of streptomycin, which is used to treat a variety of bacterial infections in humans, to be sprayed on citrus trees in Florida and California. One of the concerns was that antibiotic residues from spraying would end up in soil and nearby waterways and promote the emergence of streptomycin-resistant pathogens.
The court's decision to vacate the EPA's unlawful approval of streptomycin is a win for public health, pollinators and endangered species.
The lawsuit also argued that the agency failed to evaluate the risk that streptomycin use poses to pollinators such as bees and did not provide enough evidence that streptomycin can prevent citrus greening and citrus canker.
The court disagreed with the first argument, saying that the EPA had fully assessed the risk that using streptomycin as a pesticide would increase antibiotic resistance, and had put in place measures to mitigate it. But it agreed with the other arguments, ruling that the agency's approval was unlawful under FIFRA and the ESA because its assessment of the risk to pollinators was incomplete, and that the evidence that streptomycin can be used to prevent citrus greening or citrus canker was insufficient.
"We therefore grant the petition for review as to the pollinator and disease prevention issues so that the EPA can provide either additional support or a more cogent explanation of why the current record is adequate to support the registration, or both," the court said.
