Doctors in Ontario, Canada, are urging people to avoid any
contact with common household pesticides. Links between the pesticides and
foetal defects, neurological damage and most deadly cancers are strong enough to
prompt the warning, said the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
They released the most comprehensive study ever done in
Canada on the chronic effects of pesticide exposure at home, in the garden and
at work. ‘The review found consistent evidence of the health risks to patients
with exposure to pesticides,’ said the study.
College researchers also found consistent links between
parents’ exposure to certain agricultural pesticides in their jobs and effects
on the growing foetus ranging from damage to death. They concluded there were
risks from food residues, ant sprays and pet collars.
Children are far more vulnerable to the effects of pesticides
than adults because, as they grow, they have a greater skin surface in
proportion to their size, they ingest more food for their size and they often
have less developed ways of excreting chemicals.
After examining 12,000 studies organised between 1990 and
2003 from across the world and pairing them down to the 250 most significant,
the researchers found there was no evidence that some pesticides are less
dangerous than others – they just have different effects on health that show
over varying time scales.
‘People need to think long and hard before they take the
risk for themselves, their children and their grandchildren of having a
golf-green lawn,’ said Cathy Vakil, of the Family Medicine Centre at Queen’s
University in Kingston and one of the report’s authors. She noted that
pesticides used in Toronto’s 200,000 storm sewers to kill mosquito larvae have
retinoid as a breakdown product – a family of chemicals which causes limb
deformities in foetuses. This is washed into Lake Ontario and, in turn, in the
drinking water of the Greater Toronto Area.
Huron County Federation of Agriculture (HCFA) and the Globe and Mail, 24 April , 2004. The full report is available at: http://www.ocfp.on.ca/
[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 64, June 2004, page 15]