[Sust-mar] Pesticides: not an important sustainability issue says the province

[Helen Jones]

The NS Department of Environment and Labour has created a Roundtable
to advise the Minister on Sustainability issues.  This is a constructive
step.

However, the NSEL Policy Division has decided that the regulation of
pesticides is not an important sustainability issue and therefore doesn't
warrant a place at the roundtable.  This is a surprising conclusion.




The decision to exclude pesticide regulatory reform from the roundtable is a
regrettable and fails to serve the health of the environment or the citizens
of Nova Scotia for many reasons.  Some are:


1.  Pesticides are a risk to children's health.  See the article below on
cancer risks to PEI children ['PESTICIDES ARE WHAT IS KILLING OUR KIDS'
 - Globe and Mail 6/12/2006].

Nova Scotian children may be exposed to pesticides in the air they breathe,
the soil they play on, and the water they drink.  The NS provincial
government
tolerates a double standard in the provincial jurisdiction for
municipalities to regulate
pesticides.  HRM has a pesticide bylaw, but other NS municipalities are
severely hampered by obstructive jurisdiction in the MGA.

The province fails to provide EQUAL PROTECTION FOR ALL CHILDREN from
pesticide exposures.
It is unacceptable that some children are covered by protective legislation
and
others are prevented from having this protection simply for reasons of
chance,
i.e., the municipality they happen to live in.  The same is true for the
elderly,
expectant mothers, people with compromised health, and all residents of Nova
Scotia who live in municipalities other than HRM.

2.  All 2,4-D pesticides (in "weed and feed" or "weed control" products)
contain carcinogenic dioxins.  But the province fails to warn the public
of the "Gagetowns" on their lawns and the presence of dioxins wherever 2,4-D
has been used, i.e., in sprayed forests, on residential lawns, and on
many commercial properties (P3 schools fall under this heading).  The
province
has not yet eliminated the use of herbicides from residential use as has the
province of Quebec, or Sweden more than 15 years ago.  Why do Nova
Scotians have to wait so long for good regulatory policy?

3.  Golf courses are heavy users of pesticides (usually near population
centres).  The province does little if any monitoring of the migration of
pesticides
into nearby urban surroundings, whether carried on air currents, or
bound to soil particles and transported in surface runoff.  Mercury
contamination from golf course fungicides has been known to the province for
some time, yet soils with mercury levels well above concentrations requiring
industrial cleanup continue in our midst.

4.  The Halifax Harbour continues to receive pesticide runoff from urban
pesticide use originating from commercial properties and residential
landscape pesticide use (both with and without permits) something neither
the province nor HRM monitors or enforces with appropriate soil testing
protocols.  They should follow the example of the City of Toronto for better
enforcement.  Other NS harbours almost certainly suffer the same problems.

5.  On a related subject, fish, lobster and shellfish stocks can be harmed
by pesticide runoff in rivers and storm sewer outfalls (and other sources).
Research shows that the migratory behaviour and reproductive cycles of fish
species can be damaged by the endocrine disruptors in their environment,
many of which are pesticides.  The damage can be severe enough to interfere
with reproduction, migratory success and ultimately the survival of the
species.
What is our province doing to prevent this damage to habitat and already
depleted
stocks?

6.  Retail stores in Nova Scotia continue to display and promote toxic
pesticide products that elsewhere have been identified as serious risks to
human health and the environment.  Quebec and the EU have now banned many of
these products from retail store shelves.  The Province of Quebec provides
one of the most progressive examples of provincial pesticide regulatory in
North America.  So far, this has been ignored by NSDEL.  Aren't these
policies worthy of the Minister's attention and that of the Roundtable?

7.  Drinking water and groundwater resources are vulnerable to pesticide
use in forestry, agriculture, on residential landscapes, and Christmas trees
(often exempt from regulations imposed on other crops).  The protection of
ground water from contamination from toxins should be a top sustainability
priority,
yet the province has no comprehensive pesticide residue monitoring program.
Roughly
40% of the province is on wells and the thousands of wells and municipal
reservoirs have not yet been mapped by GIS, a step basic to implementing
safeguards.  Why is our province asleep when it comes to
protecting our drinking water?

8.  Due to inevitable disruptions from global warming and peak oil, food
security
issues will soon become paramount.  To prepare, we need to begin
rejuvenating our
farms, our farming communities and our soils as quickly as possible so that
we can feed
ourselves in the future.  Instead, the province continues to foster the
depletion of soil fertility, soil organisms, and the natural ability of
soils to fix nitrogen through the release of tons of toxic pesticides.
Preparing for living and feeding ourselves without relying on oil is a
sustainability issue of critical importance.  Who would dispute this, or the
importance of
correcting our dependence on pesticides and preventing the damage they cause
to our
drinking water and soils?  Where is the leadership and planning we deserve?




The dismissal of pesticide issues from Department of Environment and
Labour's Roundtable is short-sighted in many areas and ignores the national
trend toward pesticide-free communities.

Voice your objections (even a one sentence message can make a difference).

Call or write your MLA or contact:

Premier Rodney MacDonald,
E-mail Address: premier at gov.ns.ca
Telephone: 902-424-6600, Toll-free Message Line: 1-800-267-1993
Office of the Premier, PO Box 726, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3J 2T3.

The Minister of Environment and Labour, The Honourable Mark Parent
Email: markparentmla at ns.aliantzinc.ca
902-424-6647, Nova Scotia Environment and Labour,
PO Box 697, 5151 Terminal Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia  B3J 2T8




Thank you,

Helen Jones







Globe and Mail, December 6, 2006

'PESTICIDES ARE WHAT IS KILLING OUR KIDS'

Rural PEI is an unlikely hotbed of rare cancers, and one doctor has made it
his mission to raise awareness about the potential health hazard posed by
pesticides used on the region's potato farms.  It's a controversial
viewpoint, reports
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, but it has spurred the province to launch a probe

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

KENSINGTON, PEI - The countryside surrounding this small community near the
centre of Prince Edward Island is picture-postcard perfect. Neatly tended
farm fields devoted to the island's famed potatoes are interspersed with
clapboard homes, imagery seemingly taken straight from the pages of Anne of
Green Gables.

It is perhaps because of the province's appearance as a bucolic rural idyll
that Ron Matsusaki had the biggest shock of his professional career when he
moved to the island three years ago. The affable 57-year-old doctor was
taken aback by all the rare cancers he began noticing. The illnesses seemed
more like what might be expected near a hazardous waste site.
"Nowhere, nowhere did I see cancer that in any way resembles the cancers
that I saw when I came to PEI," Dr. Matsusaki said. "I was totally
dumbfounded."

In short order after his arrival, he came across an osteosarcoma that led to
the heart-wrenching death of a young girl, several lymphomas, an Ewing's
sarcoma, and a number of myeloid leukemia cases, all among children. Brain
cancers weren't sparing young and middle-aged adults either, with three of
them last year.

Perhaps because he arrived with the fresh eyes of a newcomer, Dr. Matsusaki
was sufficiently alarmed that he started to speak out publicly about this
rash of unusual cancers and his suspicion that the blame for them lies with
one of the island's economic mainstays, potato farming, and its promiscuous
use of pesticides.

This view -- that exposure to pesticides and other everyday environmental
pollutants is a big source of the cancer epidemic sweeping Canada -- is one
of the most controversial subjects in cancer causation. It stands to reason
that poisons used to kill bugs and weeds might pose a risk to people, but
the research picture linking pesticides to cancer has been mixed.

Many studies, but not all, on the health of residents of farming areas have
found associations between crop sprays and cancer. But this research, known
as epidemiology or the tracking of disease incidence, is considered less
conclusive than the medical evidence on such well-known carcinogens as
cigarette smoke, asbestos fibres and radon gas.

Researchers think that about 80 to 90 per cent of all cancers are due to
environmental causes broadly defined to include lifestyle factors such as
smoking and diet. It's far harder to tease out just how much is due to
polluted air, water or food, or to radiation or workplace exposures to
cancer-causing substances. One recent estimate of the impact of pollution
placed the total cancers due to this factor at about 8 to 16 per cent.

At the high end of the range, this would suggest that about 25,000 people in
Canada getting cancer this year might owe their misfortune to pollution.

Prince Edward Island would be a good place to shed more light on the health
effects of agricultural chemicals because areas such as Kensington have some
of the highest airborne concentrations of pesticides around farm fields in
the world, and a sizable rural population literally living on the doorstep
of the spraying.

After Dr. Matsusaki began to voice his concerns, the province decided to
launch an investigation to check whether Islanders have recently been more
afflicted by cancer than people elsewhere in Canada. The Department of
Health is expected to make the new cancer review public late this year, says
Dr. Linda Van Til, an epidemiologist with the PEI government.

In an e-mailed statement to The Globe, she said previous monitoring by the
Canadian Cancer Society and the federal government has found cancer rates on
the island are "slightly higher" than the national average, although she
added that this may reflect the broader national trend of having more
cancers in the East and lower rates in Western Canada.

It is possible the flurry of cancers observed by Dr. Matsusaki has been just
an unlucky coincidence. Even with extremely rare cancers, there is always a
small statistical probability that a few people living in close proximity to
each other will develop them around the same time by chance.

Dr. Matsusaki, nicknamed "Dr. Ron," worked for two decades in the U.S.
before returning in 2003 to his native Canada, where he had received his
medical training. After a career at hospitals and clinics in Texas, Alabama
and Indiana, he was convinced he'd seen everything a doctor might reasonably
be expected to come across -- until he came to PEI.

On the island, he's working as an emergency-room physician and on-call
doctor at the Western Hospital, a small 25-bed institution serving a farming
community of about 14,000 people at the island's western tip. He says one of
his first clues that something might be amiss were the two sarcomas, both
bone-related cancers, discovered in children within a year of each other in
this small population.

"That defies statistics," Dr. Matsusaki says. The cancers are exceedingly
rare, and typically only three or four children out of a million would be
diagnosed in Canada in a year with either one. The other cancers were also
of the handful-out-of-every-million-children type.

Some of those who are living in the area where Dr. Matsusaki practices and
have experienced cancer in their families are convinced that pest sprays are
the only plausible explanation because there is little in the way of
industrial releases of cancer-causing chemicals.
"I have no doubt about it. Pesticides are what is killing our kids," says
Noralee Harper, a mother whose son Brett was diagnosed two years ago at age
four with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She says there is so much cancer in PEI
among children "it's scary."

Following treatments, Brett is doing fine and is a happy six-year-old in
Grade 1. But Ms. Harper says that having a child undergo intensive
chemotherapy was the most difficult thing she has experienced. "It was the
worst thing I could ever imagine, watching Brett go through what he went
through. It was a nightmare from beginning right through to the end."

In children, there is considered to be a link between pesticides and
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, along with kidney and brain cancer and leukemia,
according to an authoritative review of the scientific literature on
pesticide-related illnesses conducted by the Ontario College of Family
Physicians in 2004.

Ms. Harper says her family was exposed to crop chemicals throughout the time
Brett was a baby and toddler; they lived in a heavily farmed area along the
Mill River "where you can't go a mile without seeing a potato field," she
said. Their house was on a downhill slope next to a spud field, and she says
residues from the spraying of potatoes frequently drifted into her home.
Based on worries about these exposures, the family moved to a house further
away from potato cultivation, which accounts for about 90 per cent of all
the pesticide used on the island.

That many Prince Edward Islanders experience extremely high pesticide levels
compared to other people in Canada was demonstrated in a pair of scientific
papers issued earlier this year by researchers at Environment Canada
investigating "second-hand" pesticide exposures, a phenomenon similar to
second-hand cigarette smoke.

Scientists from the agency have been monitoring agricultural regions for
pesticides evaporating or blowing from farm fields into nearby areas. There
are no standards in Canada for these airborne emissions and no assessments
of the health impacts of chronic, long-term inhalation of the complex mix of
insecticides, herbicides and fungicides emanating from farm fields.
Currently, only pesticide exposures in drinking water and food are
regulated.

"You can't say that they're totally safe because you haven't done that
evaluation," says William Ernst, an Environment Canada toxicologist based in
Dartmouth, N.S., who worked on the research, commenting on airborne
pesticides.

Here in Kensington, a PEI community surrounded by potato fields, one of the
studies found the second-highest pesticide readings in the country. The area
had extremely high levels of chlorothalonil, a fungicide widely used on the
island, along with 16 other pesticides.

According to the second study, by Mr. Ernst, it is likely that practically
the entire PEI population in summer is exposed to airborne pesticides. The
use of chlorothalonil in particular is so widespread, its presence "in air
is likely to be ubiquitous throughout the atmosphere of PEI during the
potato-growing season," the study said. The researchers even reported traces
of the fungus killer in the air at a remote monitoring site on a wharf
jutting into Northumberland Strait, where there was almost no nearby potato
cultivation.

Potatoes are a heavy user of chemicals, needing up to 19 sprays in a single
growing season. Farmers often spray potatoes on a weekly basis, or even more
frequently to try to prevent blight, the crop-ruining fungus that caused the
Irish potato famine, as well as herbicides to kill the tops of the plants at
the end of the growing season to make the underground tubers easier to
harvest.

There is likely to be more pesticide exposure on the Island in recent years
than there once was because potato acreage has expanded dramatically --
doubling since 1980 and up about 40 per cent since 1990, to meet the booming
demand from French-fry makers.

Farmers insist that their sprays are safe because all crop chemicals used on
the island are approved and regulated by Health Canada, according to Ivan
Noonan, general manager of the Prince Edward Island Potato Board, a growers'
association.

He says pesticides are part of modern farming, and opponents of spraying are
being unrealistic. "We have some extremists who see the thing as everybody
should have a cow, a chicken, a goat and a few potatoes and live like we did
150 years ago. That isn't going to happen."

But the idea that some Islanders are getting cancer as a byproduct of
slaking the rising national demand for French fries is widely accepted in
the area, although not all of those with cancer are convinced. Tom Rath,
diagnosed three years ago with multiple myeloma, a blood-related cancer
whose incidence is rising for unknown reasons, says "there are certainly
lots of people that believe pesticides" are the cause of cancer, but he is
keeping an open mind.  In his own case, he says: "I just looked for an
explanation.
I didn't find one."

If there is a link to pesticides, it would likely show up first in children
because their rapid cell division makes them more sensitive to
cancer-causing chemical exposures than adults.

Kathy Bigsby, a pediatric specialist at Charlottetown's Queen Elizabeth
Hospital, has also been concerned about the elevated rate of cancer among
children at the western part of the island where Dr. Matsusaki practices.

"We actually have had a clustering of cases of children with cancers of
various types from that end of the island," she says.

But Dr. Bigsby says some medical experts believe the area previously had a
relatively low rate, suggesting the current rash of cases may be an unlucky
statistical blip.

Based on its population, about five or six children on all of PEI should be
diagnosed with cancer a year, if its rate were at the national average.
There is some evidence, albeit not scientific, that PEI's rate may be far,
far higher. The Children's Wish Foundation, the charity that funds memorable
experiences for extremely ill children, says the group on PEI has either
granted or has pending 20 wishes this year for young cancer patients.

It's a statistic that has Ms. Harper fearful. She has become so worried that
agriculture has turned PEI into a pollution hot spot that she is considering
moving her family off island. "I don't think this is the right place to
raise a family," she says.

***
Cancers with suspected environmental links

Childhood leukemia
This cancer, the most common in children, is linked to the most ubiquitous
of pollutants -- the invisible lines of force known as magnetic fields that
surround all electrical-powered devices, from computers to light bulbs.
Rates of the disease rose four-fold in the U.S. over the period electricity
was introduced into common use from the 1920s to 1960s, but in recent years,
there has been a small, annual increase. Canadian research has found
children in homes with high rates of electromagnetic fields are two to four
times more likely to develop the disease.

Testicular cancer in young men 20-44
Rates have been rising sharply in Canada since the early 1980s, with men
nearly twice as likely to develop the disease than a generation ago. It is
the most common cancer in young men. Having an undescended testicle is a
risk factor, but many researchers suspect the widespread public exposure to
hormone-disrupting chemicals in many pesticides, drugs and plastics is also
a factor.

Thyroid cancer in young women 20-44
Thyroid cancer has the most rapidly rising incidence rate among young
Canadian women. Cancers are traditionally a disease of the old, and human
genetics wouldn't have changed enough in the past generation to cause such a
large increase. There are concerns the rise must be prompted by some new
environmental factor, such as exposures to hormone-disrupting chemicals.

Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in men and women aged 20-24
Rates for both men and women have shot higher in past decades. Many
researchers suspect exposure to pesticides, particularly those used to kill
plants, is a factor.


SOURCE: CANCER CARE ONTARIO: CANCER IN YOUNG ADULTS IN CANADA