Sex-changing frogs and infertile humans: Will MAHA target infamous herbicide contaminating America's water?

Atrazine is one of the most extensively used herbicides in the United States. On average, well over 70 million pounds of atrazine is sprayed every year on agricultural crops like corn and sugarcane.

This chlorotriazine herbicide — reportedly the most commonly detected herbicide in American tap water — is a potent endocrine and metabolic disruptor linked to numerous adverse health effects including birth defects, cancer, reduced sperm counts, and infertility.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recognized atrazine as "a surface water and groundwater contaminant that can enter waterways in agricultural runoff from row crops" and "cause human health problems if present in public or private water supplies in amounts greater than the drinking water standard set by EPA."

Atrazine, first registered for use in 1958 and banned by the European Union in 2004, enjoys continued support stateside by the agricultural industry despite having contaminated thousands of American communities' water supplies.

Despite years of pushback from concerned citizen and activist groups — including a class action lawsuit against agrichemical giant Syngenta, for instance, which resulted in a $105 million settlement with a number of impacted communities — the chemical compound continues to be sprayed, continues to adversely impact wildlife, and continues to leak into water systems.

That could soon change.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly raised alarm about the herbicide, its ubiquity, and its adverse impacts on various forms of life. While campaigning for president last year, he promised he would ban the chemical outright if given the chance.

'It's a gay bomb, baby.'

Now that Kennedy is running both the Department of Health and Human Services and President Donald Trump's Make America Healthy Again Commission, he can press the issue of atrazine's ruinous health effects and perhaps even change some minds over at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates herbicides.

The meme

Various activists and advocacy groups have campaigned for decades against atrazine — the use of which farmers claim helps increase production revenue. However, one of the most effective critics in terms of drawing the public's attention to the herbicide's undesirable effects appears to have been Infowars founder Alex Jones.

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In an October 2015 Infowars segment, Jones discussed the Pentagon's consideration in the early 2000s of a so-called "gay bomb" — a non-lethal chemical weapon that could hypothetically disperse unrelated sex pheromones among enemy forces and trigger homosexual engagements.

Jones segued to atrazine, saying, "What do you think tap water is? It's a gay bomb, baby."

What followed has since been memorialized in a myriad of memes.

"I don't like 'em putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay," said Jones.

'Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.'

Elements of the mainstream media appeared desperate to characterize Jones' viral suggestion about the effects of the widely used herbicide atrazine as ludicrous.

CNBC, for instance, mentioned the chemical-induced changes in frogs second in a top-5 list of Jones' "most disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theories." Jones' claims about government-executed weather modification, which are well-documented, also made CNBC's list.

An article in Forbes titled "Alex Jones' Top 10 Health Claims And Why They Are Wrong" similarly suggested that Jones was off his rocker on the matter of atrazine and sexually impacted amphibians. Forbes not only attacked Jones over his frog remarks but insinuated his claims about weather modification and fluoride's adverse impact on IQ — which the National Toxicology Program acknowledged as an unfortunate fact in a report last year — were "ridiculous."

As with weather modification and fluoride's retarding effect, Jones was sensational in his delivery but right over target.

The studies

In his famous rant, Jones was referencing a study by University of California, Berkeley endocrinologist and amphibian biologist Tyrone Hayes, which detailed how atrazine messed up the reproductive functions of adult male frogs — emasculating three-quarters of them and prompting one in 10 to develop female sexual organs.

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Hayes told UC Berkeley News in 2010, "We have animals that are females, in the sense that they behave like females: They have estrogen, lay eggs, they mate with other males. Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution."

"These kinds of problems, like sex-reversing animals skewing sex ratios, are much more dangerous than any chemical that would kill off a population of frogs," continued Hayes. "In exposed populations, it looks like there are frogs breeding but, in fact, the population is being very slowly degraded by the introduction of these altered animals."

Long before the media tried spinning Jones' claims as ridiculous, Syngenta, a major manufacturer of atrazine, tried downplaying Hayes' findings.

According to the New Yorker, Syngenta's public relations team identified over 100 "supportive third party stakeholders," including 25 professors, who would defend atrazine or serve as "spokespeople on Hayes."

'It's in 63% of our drinking water.'

While some of the apparent defenders of atrazine have suggested frogs are a poor stand-in for human beings, it's abundantly clear that the herbicide can also wreak havoc on human health.

For starters:

• A 2001 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives linked atrazine exposure to miscarriages.
• A 2006 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives linked atrazine exposure to reduced semen quality.
• A 2011 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research noted that atrazine was "associated with menstrual cycle irregularity and altered hormones."
• A 2011 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives noted that "the presence versus absence of quantifiable levels of atrazine or a specific atrazine metabolite was associated with fetal growth restriction ... and small head circumference for sex and gestational age."
• A 2018 paper in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health noted "an association between atrazine concentrations in drinking water and the odds of term [low birth weight] births within communities served by water systems enrolled in [the EPA's] Atrazine Monitoring Program in Ohio."
• A 2020 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Endocrinology indicated atrazine might contribute to the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
• A 2024 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives highlighted associated cancer risks among applicators of atrazine.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Advisory Panel concluded in a 2011 review of the human health impacts of atrazine that "the cancers for which there is suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential include: ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia and thyroid cancer."

The panel suggested further that the jury was out at the time regarding associations between atrazine and prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancers, and childhood cancers.

Despite atrazine's apparent linkages to various medical issues, the EPA concluded in a 2018 human health risk assessment that "there are no dietary (food), residential handler, non-occupational spray drift, or occupational post-application risk estimates of concern for the registered uses of atrazine."

Two years later, the same agency stated, "Atrazine is likely to adversely affect 54 percent of all species and 40 percent of critical habitats."

The MAHA momentum

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized the use of atrazine on multiple occasions.

In September 2024, Kennedy tweeted, "We need to ban atrazine now."

"It's banned in Europe, banned all over the world, but we use it here. It's in 63% of our drinking water," Kennedy told Jordan Peterson in a September 2024 interview.

"We don't know what impact it's having on our children."

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 Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Kennedy noted on his own podcast in 2022, "The capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society."

Kennedy's concerns appear to have followed him onto the MAHA Commission.

The 68-page MAHA Commission report, which came out in May, recognized that "children's unique behaviors and developmental physiology make them particularly vulnerable to potential adverse health effects" from cumulative exposures to various chemicals. In addition to microplastics, fluoride, phthalates, and bisphenols, the report mentioned crop protection tools, including atrazine, as chemicals requiring further study.

"In experimental animal and wildlife studies, exposure to another herbicide (atrazine) can cause endocrine disruption and birth defects," said the report.

'The second policy report will be a prescription for America.'

Despite the commission signaling a desire to ensure "not just the survival, but the prosperity, of American Farmers," and indicating farmers' crop protection tools won't be targeted with further restrictions or regulations without "thoughtful consideration," the Triazine Network, a coalition of groups involved in the regulation of atrazine, complained that "the assertion in the MAHA Commission's report that pesticides such as atrazine are responsible for childhood illness is irresponsible, inaccurate, and is not backed by credible scientific data."

The MAHA Report also struck a nerve with Alexandra Dunn, president and CEO of CropLife America — a trade association of agrochemical companies.

"Pesticides are thoroughly studied and highly regulated for safety," Dunn said in a statement. "This report will stir unjustified fear and confusion among American consumers who live in the country with the safest and most abundant food supply."

While it might upset manufacturers of pesticides, recent polling suggests Americans are dissatisfied with the status quo and want a closer look at what goes into their food and drink.

The latest Axios/Ipsos American Health Index poll revealed that 87% of Americans say "the government should do more to make sure food is safe, such as updating nutritional guidelines, adding labels to foods with artificial dyes, or reducing exposure to pesticides."

When pressed for comment about future plans concerning atrazine, an HHS spokesperson told Blaze News that "after the MAHA Report, the next step is to develop policy recommendations, grounded in gold-standard science and common sense. This report is a diagnosis."

"The second policy report will be a prescription for America," continued the spokesperson. "As the report outlines, Secretary Kennedy is committed to thoughtful consideration of what is necessary for adequate protection, alternatives, and cost of production."

Blaze News reached out for comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — which is working on its Updated Mitigation Proposal for atrazine — but did not receive a response by deadline.

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