Noé Gülbol, a 14-year-old teenager with a hoodie and hair over his eyes, usually walks through the wheat or barley fields to walk his dog Punky or take a bike ride. So when he found out about the presence of pesticides in his hair and urine, he wasn’t very surprised: “I knew there would be some. Every time there is fumigation, we smell it in the house. » Her little sister, Lana, 11, finds “It’s strange to have that in [son] body”: “That worries me. »
Noé and Lana live in Périgny (Charente-Maritime), a town of barely 9,000 inhabitants surrounded by the agricultural lands of the great grain plain of Aunis, near La Rochelle. Since an alert from the University Hospital of Poitiers in 2018 about cases of pediatric cancer in the neighboring city of Saint-Rogatien (2,400 inhabitants) and the death the following year of Pauline (parents wish to remain anonymous), a 15-year-old Rogatienne , Concern only grows in the territory as new cases appear.
Furthermore, at the initiative of the Avenir Santé Environnement association, created in 2018 after the declaration of Pauline’s cancer, the families of Noé, Lana and seventy other children (from 3 to 17 years old) from six municipalities of the Aunis plain (Périgny, Saint-Rogatien, Montroy, Clavette, Bourgneuf and Dompierre-sur-Mer) had hair and urine samples analyzed in the toxicology and pharmacovigilance laboratory of a university hospital. The results will be presented on Saturday, October 12 during a public meeting following a march organized in La Rochelle calling for “a true agricultural transition” already “an exit plan for synthetic pesticides”.
Banned pesticides
the world and Franceinfo had access to the results. Fourteen different molecules were found in urine and forty-five in hair, and up to six (in urine) and ten (in hair) per child. All show traces of pesticides. Some are particularly worrying. Thus, phthalimide, detected in the urine of more than 15% of children: this molecule is a product of the degradation of folpel, a fungicide classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic and possibly reprotoxic by the European Chemicals Agency. Thus, also pendimethalin, present in 20% of hair samples. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) associates this herbicide, widely used in cereal crops, with risks of cancer (pancreatic and colorectal).
You have 78.46% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
