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Article reproduced with kind permission of PAN www.pan-uk.org

and by courtesy of the Institute of Complementary Medicine’s Online Journal’s Editor Simon Best, August/September issue  www.i-c-m.org.uk

Pesticide exposures – poisons we are exposed to every day without knowing it

This report is for members of the public and their representatives, including MPs, and policy-makers at a local and national level. It is for the media, campaigners and organisations with an interest in food, the environment and public health. The aim is to produce a picture of the exposures to which an ordinary person in this country is subject on a day-to-day basis. We seek to raise awareness that, even if you are not exposed to pesticides occupationally – by working in farming or in the agrochemical industry – you are regularly exposed.

Gaps in official information are identified in this report. Important data are unavailable to the public, either because they are not disclosed by government or not collected, or because they are presented in a way that is too complex for non-specialists. Although the material presented here is technical, the report is intended as a step forward in disclosing to the public the actual extent of pesticide pollution. We challenge inadequacies in official monitoring and exposure prevention.

PAN findings:

• The pesticide industry has failed to fulfil a legal obligation, imposed over five years ago, to submit to the Government reports made to them of illnesses caused by pesticide products.

• There is no information about the regulatory status of residues on imported food and little information about the regulatory status of residues on UK-produced food. No label information is given about the pesticides used in the production of the food.

• Sixty-five per cent of the pesticides found as residues in our food have been designated by international authorities as having harmful effects on health. The levels detected are generally below legal limits, but we question regulatory assumptions of ‘acceptable’ risk.

• Toddlers are currently at risk from residues of acutely toxic pesticides, according to a new European Commission report.

• Results from one of the eight largest water companies in the UK, serving over two million consumers, indicate that drinking water is still contaminated above the limit of detection (but below the legal threshold) with a number of problem pesticides.

• Some local authorities have not carried out any tests for pesticides in private drinking water supplies since regulations were introduced in 1991.

• Information on the number of people poisoned by specific pesticides is unavailable to the public.

• There is an urgent need for action to protect highly exposed communities, for example, those living near sprayed fields.

Recommendations

The government should:

Regulation, risk assessment, and surveillance

• publish, in consultation, a national strategy for pesticide reduction, as required under the European Union’s Sixth Environmental Action Plan;

• review risk assessment procedures carried out by the Pesticides Safety Directorate, introducing a more precautionary approach to reduce overall exposure;

• integrate into the risk assessment process: biochemical data (measurements of pesticides in people), the effects of mixtures, measurements of pesticides in air and the wider environment, and focus monitoring programmes on pesticides most likely to cause harm;

• provide incentives for the expansion of the organic agriculture sector and encourage programmes of knowledge-transfer in non-chemical pest control and sustainable agriculture;

• require statutory pesticide usage reporting, publishing data on the internet;

• abolish the Health & Safety Executive’s Pesticide Incident Appraisal Panel and introduce, and publish reports of, a rigorous new surveillance scheme, of both reported and potential exposures, acute and chronic, to be managed by one organisation - we propose the Health Protection Agency;

• require the agrochemical industry to conduct post-marketing surveillance of new pesticides; to publish a helpline and website on product labels so people can report ill-health effects directly to the new surveillance scheme above; and to register all testing and re-evaluation programmes, so that both negative and positive trial results are reported;

• Require and publish registers of interest for all professionals involved in the regulation of pesticides and the surveillance of pesticide-related ill-health, with the requirement that they are updated with new information within two weeks.

Food and water

• introduce a food labelling requirement to disclose what pesticides were used in the food’s production, if necessary via a website on the label

• encourage private sector (supermarket) retailers to publish the results of their residue testing programmes;

• provide accessible information to the public about the approval status of pesticides and about residues, on both UK-produced and imported food: reports by the Pesticide Residues Committee should be electronically searchable;

• expand the residue testing programme to test more food samples, more frequently, funding it via an increase in the levy paid by agrochemical companies to the Pesticides Safety Directorate on the ‘polluter pays’ principle;

• revoke the approvals of pesticides repeatedly found as contaminants in raw and treated water; apply the ‘polluter pays’ principle to the costs of cleaning pollutants from water;

• enforce the European Commission legal limit for both public and private drinking water supplies, removing individuals’ liability for costly remedial works via increases in the levy paid by agrochemical companies to the Pesticides Safety Directorate, on the ‘polluter pays’ principle;

• require the Drinking Water Inspectorate to publish results of test findings when contaminants are persistently occurring at detectable levels in drinking water, in both public and private supplies;

• encourage the European Commission to adopt a new lower, legal limit for pesticides in water in line with improved analytical detection.

Exposures and poisonings

• introduce regulations giving people exposed to pesticides in their local environment, and the public, immediate access to information on the active ingredients to which they are being, or have been, exposed through spraying activities

• introduce statutory, no-spray, buffer zones in residential areas, to protect people living adjacent to fields

• establish, and publish, how many people live in homes directly adjacent to sprayed fields and how many miles of public rights of way cross sprayed fields;

• publish annual data on how many people are poisoned by specific pesticides, giving medical outcomes; conduct long-term medical follow-up of poisoning cases;

• require pesticide companies to comply with their legal obligation to submit immediately reports of adverse health (and environmental) effects of their products; require the submission of all such reports since the legal obligation was introduced in March, 1998.

Alison Craig can be contacted at alisoncraig@pan-uk.org .

People’s Pesticide Exposures – Poisons we are exposed to every day without knowing it,

ISBN 0 9549542 0 3, 48 pages, 12 appendices, 90 references, is available FREE as a pdf at www.pan-uk.org ; hard copy price £12.50, Pesticide Action Network UK, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4JX. Tel: 0207 065 0905; email: admin@pan-uk.org . See Conferences for upcoming annual lecture, Sex, Lies and Herbicides: the truth about atrazine.

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