Within hours of boarding a flight to Australia four years ago, Lucia Capacchioni knew something was wrong.
"I was a mess," says the 60-year-old psychologist from Cambria, Calif. "I started getting nauseous and lightheaded. My skin turned sallow. And it didn't go away. I got worse over the next few days."
Capacchioni, who says she eventually was diagnosed with chemical hepatitis, a serious condition caused by exposure to toxins, is among a growing number of airline passengers raising alarms about pesticide use on aircraft.
Earlier this year, the Department of Transportation claimed victory in a highly publicized four-year crusade to get more than 20 countries to stop spraying pesticides on planes while passengers are on board.
But the department has done little to stop what critics say is an equally dangerous alternative: spraying pesticides in empty aircraft cabins.
That's what happened to Capacchioni's plane. As with most flights to Australia, it had been treated with Permethrin, a toxic bug killer prohibited on aircraft in the USA.
Australia and five other countries, including the popular Caribbean island of Jamaica, require airlines to use the chemical or something similar. Five other countries, including the United Kingdom, require pesticides on at least some flights.
The consensus is that it kills bugs that could spread diseases. But a handful of critics say the chemicals, designed to linger on seats and overhead bins for up to eight weeks, are as harmful to passengers as the direct spraying of passengers the Department of Transportation fought to stop.
Becky Riley, a spokeswoman for the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, notes Permethrin is a nerve poison classified as a possible human carcinogen.
"It has been shown in animal studies to cause damage to the liver and lungs," she says. "Exposure can result in tremors, salivation, vomiting, diarrhea and loss of coordination."
Despite the concerns, airlines say they must comply. "We do this because it's required by the governments," says Joe Hopkins, spokesman for United Airlines, which uses Permethrin on flights to Australia and New Zealand. "If we didn't do it, we could be fined or they could remove our certificate to operate in those countries."
Should travelers be worried? Officials in Australia and elsewhere say no.
"It is completely safe," says Geof Allenby, a member of the surveillance board at Australia's Quarantine Inspection Service, which requires the spraying. He points to a World Health Organization report in 1995 that concluded the pesticide treatments on aircraft do "not present a risk to human health" if done properly.
Officials in Australia and other countries say chemicals are crucial to protect their nations from insect-borne diseases.
"Australia is an island and is fairly isolated," Allenby says. "It is free of many of the diseases of animals, plants and people found in the rest of the world."
The pesticide, he says, kills insects that could carry yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever and other deadly diseases.
Australia "is on the edge of Asia, where many of these diseases are present," he says. Pesticide use on "all aircraft from overseas is one of the main measures to maintain this insect-free status."
Some countries, however, have questioned the effectiveness of spraying. The United States abandoned the practice in 1979 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta concluded that it wasn'tsignificant for keeping out harmful alien insects.
Allenby admits that the Australian government gets complaints from passengers who say they've suffered from the pesticide. But "there is no hard evidence that the (pesticide) was the cause of any problems."
United's Hopkins points out that the airline "gets very few complaints" about the practice.
That's no surprise to Capacchioni. She says a person who fails to connect pesticide use to the kinds of symptoms she experienced could easily shrug off the illness as a cold or flu.
"They get sick, they think it's the flu, and they go about their business," she says. "They don't know what they have."
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