The danger of atrazine

WHEN Stuart Khan (Australian Financial Review letters 3/5) stated that “scientists have been unable to to draw any conclusive link between environmental exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals and any impact on human health” it was not a reasonable representation of the facts.

Part of the difficulty with this critical issue concerns what constitutes suggestive evidence and what is conclusive proof.

Should we wait for 100% certainty before taking regulatory action?

When Phil Towsend from the National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI) recently claimed on ABC talkback radio that there was “no evidence that atrazine causes cancer” he was either unbelievably ignorant or knowingly misrepresenting the facts.

The endocrine disrupting herbicide atrazine is widely used in pulpwood plantation establishment and in intensive agriculture in Australia.

Consider the following research facts.

Professor (Integrative Biology) Tyrone Hayes,from the University College of Berkely in California, who has exensively studied this chemical very recently made the following statement: “The relationship between atrazine and prostate and breast cancer is very significant”.

Correlational evidence in humans shows that people exposed to atrazine have higher rates of prostate and breast cancer. The incidence of prostate cancer in men working in a factory producing atrazine, and exposed to the chemical, was found to be elevated to 8.4 times that of workers at the same factory but not exposed to atrazine.

The European Union has banned the use of atrazine based on the human health concerns.They have done this on the basis of adherence to the precautionary principle.

Australia would be well served by a similar approach to regulation of chemical usage where there is a strong, but not necessarily conclusive, link to adverse human health outcomes.

There is no way that such dangerous chemicals should be tax deductible.

Dr Frank Nicklason (FRACP) (Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians)
West Hobart