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Let's throw caution to the wind ... but at what cost?

By Kellie Tranter - posted Monday, 13 July 2009


The standards it applies are a dead giveaway:

... It is the nature of science to seek to explain how the world works and to propose hypotheses explaining cause and effect. A number of articles are published each year suggesting possible effects of pesticides on human health or the environment. That they are published does not mean that the conclusions they make are necessarily significant or that a clear causal path is determined. Frequently, a hypothesis is offered based on initial correlations that later are found not to be completely correct because all factors had not yet been considered or even discovered. Such initial tentative hypotheses often need significant further work and confirmation by other research groups before they are accepted as firm scientific knowledge. It is the role of the scientific and regulatory community to assess all reports and consider whether the weight-of-evidence lends support for a causal linkage between a chemical and the reported effect(s) ...
Those standards - "necessarily significant conclusions", "clear causal paths", "completely correct correlations", "firm scientific knowledge" - might be well and good in academia, but if these chemicals are as toxic as some of the studies suggest the problem will end up being far from academic. When our own health and that of our children is at stake wouldn't it be more sensible, to be on the safe side, to adopt a lesser standard than academic certainty? To use a legal analogy, shouldn't it be sufficient that proof of a danger to human health is "more probable than not", rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt"?
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The entire "firm scientific knowledge" process APVMA uses sounds a bit reminiscent of the tobacco companies' persistent denial of any scientific link between smoking and lung cancer, an approach that permitted them to go on selling cigarettes and making enormous profits for years before their "science" was overwhelmed by reality and they came across with their hands up.

Agrochemical multinationals, like the tobacco companies and multinational drug companies, can throw plenty of money at questionable science, including "studies" to demonstrate the lack of any scientific proof to support concerns that have been raised. And absent a causal link established to its rigorous scientific standard APVMA will inevitably let humans, animals and marine species continue ingesting these chemicals. All of which keeps our Governments out of trouble because they can use the dedicated supervisory role and scientific credulity of APVMA as a shield to deflect the well-founded concerns of their citizens.

But even if Governments and their underlings won't act it doesn't mean we have to keep ingesting the poisons of the multinational marketeers. As in tobacco litigation, citizens and communities in the United States are leading by example. Almost five years ago Holiday Shores Sanitary District, a rural Illinois water supplier, filed a complaint against six manufacturers of atrazine, including Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc and Growmark, Inc, based on the propositions that atrazine is harmful to humans as consumed through dietary water, even including at a level less than the three parts per billion (ppb) set by the US EPA.

The defendants tried unsuccessfully to have the part of the cases alleging contamination below the EPA guidelines dismissed. Although his fundamental concern is the right of citizens to clean and uncontaminated water, Stephen Tillery, lead counsel for the plaintiff, is piqued by Syngenta's huge profits, on the one hand, and on the other the cost communities are left to bear in cleaning up atrazine contaminated water systems. It will be interesting to see what information is unearthed in that litigation and what its outcome is.

Coming back Down Under, Australians should be even more concerned than Americans. In Australia two standards or values have been set for atrazine. In the first place, a guideline value which is used to alert water authorities to chemical contamination is 0.1 parts per billion. That guideline value sounds impressively severe: surely nothing at that concentration could hurt anyone! But the real standard is the Health value, which defines the maximum concentration of a chemical in drinking water that, when considered together with amounts an individual might obtain from other dietary sources, does not exceed a level of concern. Our Australian Health value is 40ppb.

Now I don't know why Australia wouldn't use the same metrics as the World Health Organisation, which has set a guideline of 0.002 mg/litre, but if my conversion calculations are correct Australia's Health Value of 40ppb is 20 times higher than the World Health Organisation Guideline value at 2ppb. To use that well-known expression: please explain?

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Given that the Australian Government is not prepared to give us the benefit of the precautionary principle, and even if the rigorous scientific approach of APVMA is correct, what possible justification is there for our acceptable contamination levels being so much higher than the European Union, and apparently also the United States?

The effect of toxic chemicals like pesticides is a serious cause for concern for us all, and should be a serious concern for our governments. In the first place contaminants don't stay where they are applied. Atrazine residue has been detected in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon at levels exceeding Australian freshwater guidelines for species protection.

In the second place, with history repeatedly showing that drugs and chemicals once thought safe end up being identified as deleterious to plants, marine life, animals and often humans, why don't we follow the EU, representative of the oldest and wisest Western societies, and apply the precautionary principle to all human activities? Its application shouldn't concern anyone except companies and people whose activities generate an identified and plausible risk of serious long term harm and who can't establish that what they want to do isn't going to cause that harm.

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About the Author

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer and human rights activist. You can follow her on Twitter @KellieTranter

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