A leading cancer expert claims that pesticides are the top environmental suspect for increases in the disease. Speaking at a Pesticides Action Network (PAN UK) conference, Professor Dominique Belpomme said that “while previously tobacco was thought to account for a third of malignancies we have concluded it causes no more than 15 per cent: Other environmental factors are at work”.

At next Wednesday's Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture, Sandra Steingraber, an international expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health, will back this view up: “When our environment is contaminated with toxic chemicals, so too are we. The simple biological truth of toxic trespass raises human rights questions of the most fundamental sort.”

“Everyone now has a cocktail of poisonous chemicals in their bodies,” said PAN UK. “A test has revealed 20 pesticides and other contaminants in the body tissue of six volunteers from PAN UK. The laboratory described residue levels in five of the six of those tested as “significant”, “well above background” or “above background”.

In her lecture, Steingraber will raise the questions: “Who benefits from the ongoing dependencies of our industrial and agricultural systems on chemicals with suspected links to cancer, birth defects, and brain damage? Who pays the price? What are the responsibilities of governments to prevent harm and compel the transformation toward a non-toxic economy? And what are our responsibilities as individual citizens.”

PAN UK claims to promote “healthy food, agriculture and an environment which will provide food and meet public health needs without dependence on toxic chemicals, and without harm to food producers and agricultural workers. PAN UK is a non-profit organisation that works nationally and internationally with like-minded groups and individuals concerned with health, environment and development to eliminate the hazards of pesticides, reduce dependence on pesticides, and to increase sustainable and ecological alternatives” its literature says.

PAN UK is running a right to know campaign to ensure people know what pesticides are being used and when. It wants the government to make it mandatory for pesticide users to give the public advance warning, and put up signs in fields near houses and where there are rights of way. It also wants food labelling to show which pesticides were used in its production.

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