Despite assurances from the pesticide industry and the EPA that there’s nothing to worry about, questions remain about atrazine’s ability to cause cancer. In May, the President’s Cancer Panel released a landmark report that used atrazine as an example of a pesticide linked to cancer, and this week the American Cancer Society included the profitable herbicide in its list of 19 “suspected carcinogens whose potential to cause cancer is as yet unresolved.” According to ACS’s Elizabeth Ward, chemicals were included on the list “based on evidence of widespread human exposures and potential carcinogenicity in animals or humans.” More than 75 million lbs of atrazine are used annually in the U.S., and it is the most common pesticide detected in water, found in 93.9% of drinking water samples recently tested by the USDA.
According to this week’s report, which was a collaboration between the ACS, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the National Cancer Institute, atrazine is known to cause cancer in lab animals, but evidence for carcinogenicity in humans is inadequate. The report suggests several studies for nailing down atrazine’s cancer-causing potential.
“Historically, the ACS has been quite conservative when it comes to naming specific chemicals, so the fact that they’ve done this — and that Syngenta’s atrazine is on the list — is significant,” commented Pesticide Action Network staff scientist Karl Tupper. “This listing underscores the need for a precautionary approach. We’re don’t know for sure whether atrazine causes cancer, and it will take years of additional research to answer that question definitively. But in the meantime, unless something changes, millions of Americans drink and bathe in atrazine-contaminated water, and hundreds of thousands of farmers and farmworkers are exposed to it as they work the land.”
Panups 23 July 2010, via Dr Alison Bleaney
