The campaign "Home without toxics" calls for a new way to reassess chemical products without as much weight as industry tests
There are many voices that have denounced the existence of "serious deficiencies in the evaluation of chemical products" in Europe. Among the most critical is Carlos de Prada, responsible for the "Home without toxic" campaign of the Vivo Sano Foundation. This entity is warning about the problems caused by the use of pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides), many of them endocrine disruptors, that is, substances capable of altering the body's hormonal system, which can lead to many health problems .
De Prada confesses alarmed by the discrepancies that have shown the various international organizations in relation to the toxicity and harmlessness of glyphosate, the herbicide most used in the world.
In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), WHO, classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" to humans; however, a few months later, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) came to the opposite conclusion: there were no such risks. The same opinion was expressed by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) or the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And this is not the only case of discrepancy.
"The procedures are scandalous, since they depend, first of all, on studies carried out by the industries that sell the pesticides," says Carlos de Prada (author of the book Foods with residual hormone-disrupting pesticides, which questions the "blind faith in the science and of little official criticism "towards the studies of the own industry and sees conflicts of interests between its protagonists.
"These studies, moreover, are secret and, therefore, are not subject to the general criticism of the scientific community," he adds. "Only the existence of highly improvable evaluation procedures explains that there may be pesticides on the market that, as with glyphosate, can be dangerous."
Until 2008 there was no obligation in the EU that in the dossiers for the evaluation of the toxicity of pesticides were incorporated other studies than those of the industries themselves and in any case, since these are the ones that elaborate the dossiers , there is still an incorrect application, says this expert, who has asked to change the evaluation procedures. An example of this type of surprising discrepancies is found in a report published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe on January 14, which compares the divergent conclusions of the IARC (WHO) and the EPA. The analysis (a complete inventory) studied the genotoxicity of glyphosate, that is, the ability of the substance to damage DNA: one of the mechanisms responsible for cancer.
In its evaluation of 2016, the EPA took into account 52 genotoxicity tests carried out by industries on pure glyphosate and 52 independent studies on the same. Result: only one industrial test (2% of the total) indicated genotoxicity of the product, while the other tests were negative. In contrast, 67% of published scientific studies show a genotoxicity of this substance. In its analysis, the EPA gives more weight to the tests of the companies, reason why it concludes that the glyphosate is not genotoxic. In contrast, of the 118 studies handled by IARC (WHO), 70% show this toxicity.
The campaign "Homes without toxics" (Greenpeace, Ecologists in Action ..) calls for the prohibition of glyphosate, for its effects on health, the environment and biodiversity. In addition, it is requested that the procedures for the approval and evaluation of pesticides in the EU be modified.