New research links 485 pesticide chemicals to breast cancer
Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer
A peer-reviewed study in Environmental Health Perspectives identifies at least 485 chemicals used in US pesticide products that are linked to breast cancer, including hundreds of "inert" ingredients that escape thorough safety review. The chemicals appear not only in crop pesticides but also in lice treatments, lawn fertilizers, and flea and tick products. The EPA evaluates ingredients individually, not whole formulas or cumulative exposure, which researchers call a regulatory blind spot.
The body does not distinguish between inert and active ingredients – inactive substances are no less of a danger to human health
- timr
The actual paper [1] is quite bad. They mine the literature for chemicals with any publication that suggests a link to cancer (or appearance in certain databases based on the same approach), and then spend most of their efforts determining amounts of production and use of the chemicals in question.
This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.
(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/evhpaz/article/doi/10.1021/EHP.6c00022/...
- loeg
As usual in this kind of thing, "linked to" in this context does not mean anything like "actually known to cause breast cancer in humans." Just as we have cured cancer in rodents repeatedly, we have also caused cancer in rodents repeatedly, sometimes by giving them extremely high doses of chemicals that do not correspond to how much a human might consume.
- VladVladikoff
I really hope that Canada joining the EU forces some stricter regulations on crops grown in Canada. It’s sad how poor of a job our government does to protect its citizens.