Medfly Madness

By Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles

The tiny, blue-eyed Mediterranean fruit fly has a way of provoking political distemper in California. In 1981, amid a furor over spraying to control a 1,400-sq.-mi. outbreak, the director of the California Conservation Corps flamboyantly swallowed and survived a big -- albeit heavily diluted -- mouthful of the insecticide Malathion to demonstrate its safety. Nothing quite so theatrical has been attempted during the latest medfly visitation, which began five months ago. But state food and agriculture department officials responsible for the anti-medfly campaign have stood under a drizzle of the pesticide showering from a helicopter. Unconvinced, some irate citizens are barring their children from local playgrounds, covering up their pools and beehives and, in some cases, moving out of their houses to motels.

To stop the bugs, the food and agriculture department has ordered a series of further aerial sprayings of Malathion over a 270-sq.-mi. area of Los Angeles and Orange counties. Beginning this week, 28 communities with a total population of 1 million will be sprayed by low-flying helicopters. If the plan , runs its course, there will be a total of eight to twelve treatments over the next five months.

Malathion spraying, the agency argues, is a necessary supplement to "biotechnical control," which consists of releasing 140 million sterile male medflies weekly into infested areas to disrupt the insects' prodigious reproduction. Malathion, state officials insist, is the mildest available pesticide. Though the chemical is toxic to the skin and respiratory system in concentrated doses, officials say, it is quite harmless in the diluted (2.8 ounces per acre) form used in spraying.

The stepped-up spraying touched off a political uproar. The Los Angeles City Council unanimously asked the state to conduct further studies and examine alternatives. Moaned Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman: "Once, twice, O.K. People will accept that. But twelve times? I question what the health effects might be."

Opponents, organized into a Coalition Against Urban Spraying, argue that some academic and foreign research shows that Malathion is a potential carcinogen -- a claim the state adamantly rejects. "The opposition so far is just a small dose of what's coming," warns David Bunn, a local leader of the environmental group Pesticide Watch. The most bizarre protest of all has been a letter to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and local newspapers, sent by an ecoterrorist organization calling itself the Breeders, which claimed to be breeding and releasing its own medflies. The organization's alleged purpose: to render the medfly problem "unmanageable" and Malathion spraying "financially intolerable." Last week attorneys for the antispraying coalition filed a legal challenge against the state with the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that the spraying is illegal under federal law and demanding a public hearing on the issue.