In 1989 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided to ban it because "long-term exposure to Alar poses unacceptable risks to public health." The ban followed a February 1989 broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes highlighting a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council claiming that alar was a dangerous carcinogen.
The broadcast and the ban weren't the end of the story, though. Apple growers in Washington State filed a libel suit against CBS, NRDC and Fenton Communications, claiming the "scare" had cost them $100M. The suit was dismissed in 1994. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Whelan and her organization, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), were working to establish a narrative of the Alar episode as a "scare". The ACSH claimed that Alar and its breakdown product UMDH had not been shown to be carcinogenic, even going so far as to claim that the National Cancer Institute had cleared Alar as a carcinogen (it hasn't). Whelan's campaign was so effective that today, "Alar scare" is shorthand among news media and food industry professionals for an irrational, emotional public scare based on propaganda rather than facts.
Ironically, the Alar "scare" does seem to have been based on facts. Alar has been verified as a human carcinogen. Consumers Union ran its own studies and estimated the human lifetime cancer risk to be between 5 - 50 per million. (1 case per million is the threshold at which the government considers a carcinogen a significant public health concern.)
The Alar "scare" also prompted the introduction of food libel laws in 13 states.
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