Chlordecone: the pesticide that kills

Chlordecone: the pesticide that kills

France remains one of the main countries using pesticides in agriculture: 70,000 tonnes per year despite the impact on the environment and health risks. In the West Indies chlordecone, which has been used for decades, is the cause of cancer and serious diseases. Entire lands have been polluted. The damage caused by this pesticide is still far from being definitively assessed. At the Pointe-à-Pitre hospital centre, prostate cancer patients. The number of these patients received each year by Professor Pascal BLANCHET and his team is exceptional. The West Indies hold the world record for prostate cancer. The cause of this is chlordecone, a pesticide used in banana plantations until the mid-2000s. The health and ecological consequences would be almost irremediable. - Corinne LEPAGE: "Many sick and many dead, considerable costs for Social Security and uneducated land for decades and decades". The babies are also victims of chlordecone which would trigger psychomotor disorders in them, except in cases of breastfeeding. Researchers are concerned about the possible persistence of these disorders. - Dr Luc MULTIGNER, researcher at INSERM: 'Will they diminish or rather increase and have a greater clinical manifestation?' At the request of the banana growers, the government has authorized by derogation the aerial spreading of pesticides in the West Indies while it is prohibited in France since 2010. An embarrassing question for the government at the environmental conference - Stéphane LE FOLL, Minister of Agriculture: "We are going to work quickly to ensure that we end up abandoning what is a health risk and what must be limited in the immediate term and abandoned in the medium term." Alerted by the oncologists, the council of the Martinique Medical Association issued an opinion against these sprays. - Prof Dominique BELPOMME, Director of the European Cancer Research Institute: 'There are other pesticides that have been withdrawn from the US market because they are highly toxic. We’ve stopped chlordecone, but we’re doing the same thing again to pollute these islands." For water and soil polluted with chlordecone, a sustainable solution is still far from being found.

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File : Chlordecone scandal

Publication date : 14 September 2012