Baskut Tuncak is a prominent expert and advocate in the field of human rights and environmental law. He has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes, where he highlighted the human rights impacts of pollution, toxic chemicals, and hazardous waste on vulnerable populations, including children.
He stated in a November 2017 article:
Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds.”
In February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (Greenpeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture.
Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.
In his 2017 article, he stated:
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child… makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere, and they are invisible.”
Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.
He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry- funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.
And in 2015, writer Carol Van Strum said the US Environmental Protection Agency has been routinely lying about the safety of pesticides since it took over pesticide registrations in 1970.
She has described how faked data and fraudulent tests led to many highly toxic agrochemicals reaching the market, and they still remain in use, regardless of the devastating impacts on wildlife and human health.
In 2017, the then chief scientific adviser to the UK government, Prof Ian Boyd, claimed that regulators around the world have falsely assumed that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes and the “effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been largely ignored.”
It is concerning to note that in the 2022 paper ‘Neonicotinoidinsecticides found in children treated forleukaemiasandlymphomas’ (Environmental Health), the authors stated that multiple neonicotinoids were found in children’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma and urine. As the most widely used class of insecticides worldwide, they are ubiquitously found in the environment, wildlife and foods.
A 2017 study by Carlos Javier Baier and colleagues documented behavioural impairments following repeated intranasal glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH) (the world’s most widely used agricultural herbicide) administration in mice. Intranasal GBH caused behavioural disorders, decreased locomotor activity, induced an anxiogenic behaviour and produced memory deficit.
The paper contains references to many studies from around the world that confirm GBHs are damaging to the development of the foetal brain and that repeated exposure is toxic to the adult human brain and may result in alterations in locomotor activity, feelings of anxiety and memory impairment.
Research by the US-based Environmental Working Group (EWG) in 2019 found glyphosate residues on popular oat cereals, oatmeal, granola and snack bars. Almost 75% of the 45 samples tested had glyphosate levels higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety.
PERCEPTION RESET 