The UK government urgently needs to adopt the following key recommendations (the full list can be found in the report): Ensure that no weakening of UK pesticide regulations or standards occurs as a result of Brexit, including through trade negotiations with non-EU countries, and that in turn food imports meet [...]

Brexit presents both significant threats and opportunities in terms of addressing existing concerns around pesticide cocktails. Despite government promises to the contrary, the UK’s exit from the EU threatens to significantly weaken UK pesticide standards. This could potentially lead to a major rise in the number of active substances authorised [...]

If a substance is classified as a known carcinogen for example, it does not automatically mean that exposure to it will definitely result in the development of cancer. The classification simply means that in tests for toxicity the substance can cause a particular effect. There are many factors that influence [...]

While pesticide cocktails tend to be more commonly found in fruit and vegetables, they do feature in other types of food. In both 2017 and 2018, roughly a quarter of all food items tested by the government (which include animal products and grains) contained pesticides cocktails. In 2017, a quarter [...]

Washing or peeling fruit and vegetables can potentially reduce exposure to pesticides as some residues that appear on the surface will be eliminated, particularly traces of soil which may contain harmful bacteria. However, although washing or peeling will reduce the level of pesticides found on the outside of an item, [...]

Our current regulatory system focusses solely on assessing the risk posed to human health by individual pesticides, failing to account for interactions between multiple chemicals. Pesticides are tested in isolation for harmful effects and are not looked at in combination. This system not only fails to protect us from the [...]

Over time plants, pests and diseases can develop resistance to the pesticides used to control them – meaning that these pesticides are no longer effective at dealing with the particular problem. One of the main strategies currently employed to deal with resistance is to use a wider range of active [...]

Pesticides appear in millions of different combinations in varying concentrations in our food and landscape. While various efforts are underway by researchers to create a system capable of monitoring the cocktail effect, it is unlikely that any will be sophisticated enough to accurately assess the full spectrum of health and [...]

Despite the prevalence of pesticide cocktails, and the evidence that they can be more harmful than individual pesticides, the UK continues to assess the safety of one chemical at a time. Safety assessments of pesticide residues in our food continue to be based on analysis of individual chemicals, ignoring the [...]

There is a growing body of evidence showing that pesticide cocktails can have significantly more harmful effects than individual chemicals, even when each appears at levels at or below its “no-observed-effect-concentration”. Health effects revealed include obesity and impaired liver function, the creation of cancer cells and disruption of the endocrine [...]

The cocktail effect is a significant problem in the UK which demands urgent attention. Over a third of all the fruit and vegetables tested by the UK government in 2017 and 2018 contained residues of more than one pesticide. Pesticide cocktails are not only found in fruit and vegetables. In [...]

Given the wide variety of different active ingredients used in food production, pesticides almost always appear in mixtures, commonly referred to as ‘pesticide cocktails’. These mixtures appear in our food, water and soil and can contain residues of as many as fourteen different pesticides. There is a growing body of [...]