Oct. 5, 2016. A number of concerns have been raised by various stakeholders relative to EPA’s draft ecological risk assessment for the triazines. These concerns include: errors in endpoint data and the water monitoring database; use of models that are not validated with field data; estimates of inflated hypothetical risks (e.g. atrazine applications resulting in 36% bird mortality) that have not been observed in over 55 years of atrazine use; use of data or findings not conducted in accordance with EPA’s scientific guidelines required under FIFRA; and ignoring the advice and findings of previous Science Advisory Panels on atrazine. The WSSA stresses the importance of addressing these concerns in order to maintain stakeholder confidence in the Agency’s science-based regulatory framework. However, our main concern, based on the current ecological draft risk assessment, is that atrazine and simazine would be restricted to less than 0.25 lbs a.i./A and 0.5 lbs a.i./A, respectively. At these low rates, atrazine and simazine would not provide efficacious weed control. In addition, using sub-lethal rates of atrazine or simazine is not an effective option for resistance management as it has been shown that this practice is likely to result in weeds with multiple-site or polygenic resistance which would make it more difficult to control these weeds.
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