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Yet pesticides will always be a prime target for activists. Pesticides, by defurition, kill pests; they are always toxic to some degree and must be handled accordingly. Their enormous benefit to agriculture and mankind is too often simply taken for granted, and many urban and suburban people are content to assume that their food and fiber come from the local shopping mall. Further, "environmentalism" is now very big business with the jobs of tens of thousands of people depending on it. Activist groups must constantly demonstrate a need for their existence in order to maintain the public support necessary to pay then salaries. With the cancer issue more or less beaten to death, we can expect new and more vaguely defined alarms to be sounded. The current "endocrine disruptor" scare is a classic example. 2,4-D: an endocrine disruptor? Endocrine disruption is a hypothesis which suggests that many man-made chemi- cals in the organochlorine group may have the potential to mimic human hormones such as estrogen, and thus may be a cause of cancers of the breast, uterus, prostate, testes, etc., along with such hormone related effects as decreased sperm counts, infertility, and altered child development, with similaz effects on wildlife. This issue was very vividly brought to the public's attention with the eazly 1996 publication of t7trr Stolen Future, a book written by Theo Colbom of the World Wildlife Fund. The book was written much like a detective story, with endocrine disruption the criminal to be tracked down. The book appears to present endocrine disruption by man-made chemicals, not as a hypothesis, but a scientific fact. Although the impact of the book has been considerably less than that of Silent Spring (to which Vice President Al Gore compares it in the foreword), it has motivated many en- vironmental groups to call for the banning or strict regulation of all man-made or- ganochlorines, which would include many pesticides and a whole array of very useful products, including medicines. Regulators have been much more cautious (see "Endocrine disruption data still too weak to serve as basis for pesticide regulation, scientists agree," Pesticide and Toxic Chemical News, October 9, 1996). One of the problems facing scientists investigating this issue, is that compounds of this type are both man-made and naturally occurring. Fla- vonoids present in most fruits and vegetables aze, by far, our largest dietary source of such compounds. A recent study (see Safe, Stephen, Environmental Health Perspectlves, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995) measured the estrogen equivalents per day from normal fruit and vegeta- ble consumption at 102 versus 0.0000025 from daily dietary exposure from all man-made sources, including pesticides. Compare this with exposure from the birth control pill (16,675) or the "rooming after" pill (333,500), and you can see why scientists are pro- ceeding cautiously with the hypothesis. Nevertheless, activist groups have already jumped on the endocrine disruptor bandwagon, and are pumping out alarmist literature. A recent example is a report entitled, Growing doubt: A Primer on Pesticides Identified as Endocrine Disruptors and or Re- productive Toxicants, by Benbrook Consulting Services of Washington, D.C., a consulting