A new study found the amount of pesticides used on farms was strongly associated with the incidence of many cancers — not only for farmers and their families, but for entire communities. It comes on the heels of substantial lobbying by the pesticide industry this spring to limit its liability from lawsuits over their products’ health impacts.
The just-released analysis showed that “agricultural pesticides can increase your risk for some cancers just as much as smoking,” says coauthor Isain Zapata, an associate professor of research and statistics at Rocky Vista University in Colorado. For example, living in places with high pesticide use increased the risk of colon and pancreatic cancers by more than 80 percent, results that surprised even the researchers.
“In my opinion, that’s crazy,” Zapata said, adding they were not expecting to find such a significant association.
The research idea came from one of Zapata’s students, a medical student who grew up on a farm. The scientists obtained data on the use of sixty-nine different pesticides from surveys conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). They then compared these to cancer incidence rates per county nationwide, using databases from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2015 to 2019. Finally, they adjusted the analysis for other factors that might have contributed, including socioeconomic disparities. The results were published on Thursday in the academic journal Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society.
The study, the researchers say, is the first comprehensive evaluation of cancer risk associated with pesticides on a population level. They were careful not to attribute the harms to particular…
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Auteur: Lois Parshley
