The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
—Jean Rostand
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you film.” Rather pleasant-looking in his business suit, Jean-Marc de Cacqueray, director of the Regional Office for Labor, Employment, and Training (Direction régionale du travail, de l’emploi, et de la formation, DRTEFP) of Brittany, looked openly embarrassed. “Why?” I insisted. “Who’s against it?” The director glanced desperately at François Boutin, his assistant for professional risk prevention, who, under pressure from his boss, finally said “Coop de France.”
“OK,” I said, a bit amused, as my cameraman filmed the incredible scene with a hidden camera, “in that case I’d like to speak with a representative of Coop de France.”
“Go get Lacombe,” Cacqueray said. Boutin followed orders and went into the amphitheater of the Faculty of Trades of Ker Lann, near Rennes, which I’d managed to get into a few minutes earlier, before being escorted out by a very aggressive bodyguard, who I presume was a representative of Coop de France Ouest. But Étienne Lacombe, the organization’s official representative, did not deign to come to explain why he wanted to keep me from filming the seminar on “Farmers and Their Health” being held that day, December 1, 2009, by the DRTEFP and the Agricultural Social Mutual Fund (Mutualité sociale agricole, MSA), and open to all the “shippers and sellers of phytosanitary products” in the region of Brittany.
When Agricultural Cooperatives Make Law
This interesting program was being held in connection with setting up the “certiphyto,” the diploma that will be obligatory in 2015 for anyone recommending, selling, or using phytosanitary products for professional purposes. “Products that are not inoffensive, because some preparations are classified for their carcinogenic, mutagenic, and reprotoxic (CMR) effects,” as the invitation that I have carefully kept explains.
Yet everything had started out well. I had been told about the seminar a few days earlier by Dr. Jean-Luc Dupupet, who was scheduled to give a presentation on the link between pesticide exposure and cancer; he had put me in touch with François Boutin. When I contacted Boutin, he immediately sent me an e-mail with all the “documents related to the seminar” so that I could prepare for filming. On November 26, my answering machine had a slightly embarrassed but cordial message from Boutin. I provide its content here not to discredit him but to show the power of agricultural cooperatives, who are able to lay down the law for a representative of the state whenever they feel their interests threatened.
“This is about the seminar on phytosanitary products,” he said. “As a matter of principle, I asked other participants, and the leader of the trading companies is in favor; the Regional Labor Director, my boss, is also in favor of your participation; on the other hand, my counterpart in Coop de France is a little hesitant.” Then he read me a convoluted e-mail in which the representative of the agricultural cooperatives asked that we give up filming the seminar, with a very strange argument: “The main reason is the short time between now and December 1, which will not allow us to prepare with Arte the conditions under which this documentary will be produced. We are open to exchanges about propositions we could present jointly, for example organizing visits to and conversations in cooperatives.”
Nonetheless, François Boutin seemed rather confident: “I’m in the process of trying to defuse this argument so you can be allowed to come in any case, but I can’t betray or be disloyal to my partners in this matter. I’ll keep you informed during the day by telephone or e-mail.” Indeed, a few hours later, I received an e-mail asking me in the end to give up our trip to Rennes. But the National Audiovisual Institute (Institut national audiovisuel, INA), the film’s producer, and I had decided to go, thinking that the obstacle could be removed when we got there. However, despite the intervention of Dupupet, who had tried to persuade the regional director to allow us to film at least his presentation, we returned to Paris empty-handed.
When I got home, I conducted a brief investigation of Coop de France. I discovered that, established in 1966, during the boom in chemical agriculture, the “unified professional organization of agricultural cooperation” brought together “three thousand industrial and commercial enterprises and more than fifteen hundred subsidiaries,” which produced a “combined turnover evaluated at more than 80 billion euros in 2008.” With “at least 150,000 permanent employees,” Coop de France represents a huge business adding up to “40 percent of French food processing” and controls the majority of agricultural production since “three-fourths of the 406,000 farms belong to at least one cooperative.” On the other hand, what the website of Coop de France does not say is how much revenue is provided to cooperatives by phytosanitary products, which makes up a significant part of their fabulous earnings.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note what bad press these products seem to have received even on the websites of agricultural cooperatives. One example is the site for Terrena, a large Breton cooperative which advocates an “ecologically intensive agriculture” and has an annual turnover of 3.9 billion euros. It is futile to look for the earnings it derives from phytosanitary products: the information never appears, even in its annual report, which is online. If you look under the heading “Agronomy and Agricultural Supplies,” a subdivision of “Animal Production and Large-Scale Crops,” you find “some figures”: “enrichment and fertilizers” (300,000 tons); “plant health” (3.9 million acres); “seeds” (790,000 acres); “agricultural and rural equipment” (35 million euros); “total turnover” (216 million euros). Chemical poisons are concealed under the term “plant health,” but the only indication provided concerns the number of acres treated with products sold by the cooperatives.
The Terrena site also explains that the cooperative has a 43 percent stake in Odalis, whose “profession” is to “connect suppliers to distributors and farmers.” The “suppliers” are pesticide manufacturers, whose attractive cans can be seen in a video posted by Odalis to present its know-how.1 We learn that “26 thousand tons of products are shipped annually,” for revenues of 3.6 million euros. But the portion accounted for by pesticides is not specified, because the amount indicated includes “agricultural seeds” as well as “plant health products.”
Surfing the Web, I discovered in any case that in January 2009 Coop de France had sponsored a little brochure titled “The Proper Use of Glyphosate in Agriculture,” apparently with no financial support from Monsanto.2 One of its authors was none other than Étienne Lacombe.
Chronic Poisoning of Farmers by Pesticides: An Infernal Trap
“Do you understand why Coop de France kept me from filming the seminar in Rennes?” Three months after the unfortunate Breton incident, I could not resist the wish to record the testimony of Jean-Luc Dupupet, when we met at the agricultural lycée in Pézenas. It was obviously a sensitive question. “Well,” the doctor in charge of chemical risks for the MSA mumbled. After a long silence, he said, “There you’ve got me stuck. It’s very hard for me to give you an explanation. Um, you know the chronic effects of phytosanitary products is still a taboo subject and obviously the agricultural cooperatives prefer that it be talked about, let’s say, privately, without the media being present.”
“Are they afraid their members and employees will turn against them, accusing them of complicity in poisoning or for not assisting a person in danger, as Sylvain Médard did recently?”
“Um.”
“You know who Sylvain Médard is?”
“Yes, of course. He was a technician in an agricultural cooperative and developed a rare form of myopathy that was recognized as an occupational disease.”
Indeed, it was even a first, which was widely reported and caused a stir in agricultural circles. Sylvain Médard had worked for thirteen years in an agricultural cooperative in Picardy, Capsom (located at Corbie, Somme), when in 1997 doctors diagnosed him with “acquired mitochondrial myopathy,” a neuromuscular disease with a gloomy prognosis which causes degeneration of muscle tissue. As its name indicates, unlike other types of myopathy, the one the thirty-three-year-old man is suffering from is not genetic in origin, but caused by a toxic agent in medication or chemicals. The agricultural technician’s main work consisted of testing new pesticides on behalf of manufacturers who had filed a request for marketing authorization. In the professional jargon, he was “in charge of tests on samples.” For this purpose, companies sent unlabeled cans to the cooperative, each with a number written on it. For years, the technician had handled dozens of poisons, protected only by a cotton suit and a simple paper mask, just enough to protect him from inhaling dust.
Sylvain Médard decided to bring his case to the Social Security Court (Tribunal des affaires de sécurité sociale, TASS) in Amiens. On May 23, 2005, determining that “respiratory protection was insufficient,” the judges found the cooperative liable for “inexcusable negligence,” on the grounds that it “could not have been unaware at the time of the health risks tied to the toxic products to which its employees were exposed.” “This decision gives hope to the victims of occupational diseases in agriculture,” according to a press release from Michel Ledoux, Médard’s lawyer.3 Indeed, the case marked a turning point in the way pesticides are seen in France—first of all by the agricultural cooperatives, paralyzed by the prospect of what some were calling the “new asbestos scandal.”4
“That’s a little exaggerated,” according to Dupupet, who obviously does not appreciate the comparison. “What I can tell you is that the attitude of the cooperatives is changing: it’s true that until recently, they were interested only in the agronomic results of phytosanitary products, but now they’re beginning to talk about health risks, warning users as a pharmacist does when a patient buys a medication after a medical consultation.”5 The MSA chief doctor said nothing further, but we must acknowledge his frankness and the efforts he has been making to break the implacable law of silence that surrounds the long-term consequences of repeated exposure to pesticides. Indeed, we have to acknowledge that, although it is still very cautious, the new posture adopted by the MSA, long denounced for its silence on the issue, has clearly broken with the denial that continues to characterize the beneficiaries of this deadly commerce—the merchants, among whom are agricultural cooperatives, and the manufacturers—as well as the public authorities.
It is one thing to acknowledge that pesticides can cause acute poisoning; faced with a farm worker who starts to vomit or suffers second-degree burns after handling phytosanitary products, it is hard to deny the causal link, even though, as we saw with Paul François in Chapter 1, the victims are often confronted with bad faith on the part of their employers or the manufacturers. But it is another thing to venture onto the more unstable, indeed frankly mined, territory of the long-term consequences of chronic poisoning—repeated small doses—by the descendants of poison gas.
Incidentally, in the Paul François case, it’s a safe bet that Monsanto would not have persisted in denying his acute poisoning if the farmer from Ruffec had not dug in his heels. What the company did not want to admit is that accidental poisoning can produce serious chronic effects, because that would mean opening a Pandora’s box and would lead to a challenge to the toxicologists’ dogma that “the dose makes the poison”—I’ll come back to this.
The fact that cases of accidental poisoning represent only the “tip of the iceberg” in the words of Maria Elena Rosas, director of RAP-AL Chile (see Chapter 3), had already been glimpsed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring: “We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can precipitate acute poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, spraymen, pilots, and others exposed to appreciable quantities of pesticides are tragic and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly contaminate our world.”6
What Carson describes for the “population as a whole” is particularly true for farmers who handle numerous pesticides for many years without ever being victims of acute poisoning, but who are in regular contact with these substances, inhaling them or absorbing them through the skin—especially because, as the French Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (Agence française de sécurité sanitaire de l’environnement et du travail, AFSSET) report cited in Chapter 3 showed, protective clothing is usually ineffective. The problem is that when they develop a serious illness, such as cancer or Parkinson’s disease, it is very hard for them to demonstrate a relationship between their complaints and their occupational activity, precisely because they have been exposed to a multitude of agents that might cause the same effects, which complicates the identification of a causal link with a particular substance. And without an established causal link, there is no official recognition of an occupational disease and hence neither provision of treatment nor indemnification for the harm suffered.
This situation, which has long guaranteed the impunity of the manufacturers of poisons, leads to what the Quebec toxicologist Michel Gérin and his co-authors, in their seminal work Environnement et santé publique (Environment and Public Health), call an “under-reporting of environmental diseases,” beginning with those linked to chronic exposure to pesticides: “Recognition of the real impact of the environment on health suffers from the difficulty of establishing, on an individual basis, the environmental origin of a disease. The problem is particularly acute in the case of effects linked to the exposure to toxic substances, often medium- or long-term effects whose ‘signature’ escapes doctors’ grasp. Several factors contribute to this underestimate. A major obstacle comes from the often significant latency between exposure and diagnosable effect, which makes the establishment of a causal link problematic. Past exposure or use is forgotten, or there no longer is objective information about exposure. Further, the non-specificity of most effects tied to the environment means that their possible environmental origin goes unnoticed.”7
Indeed, the situation of farmers is very different from that of workers in Saint-Gobain factories who were exposed to asbestos fibers while manufacturing fiber cement panels. As Fabrice Nicolino and François Veillerette accurately explain, “the inconceivable tragedy of asbestos had, if we dare say it, a considerable advantage over the tragedy of pesticides. This carcinogenic fiber leaves traces, a kind of fingerprint, even a genetic print of the crime, which takes the lively form of a cancer specific to the pleura, correlated so closely to contact with asbestos that everyone, including specialists, calls mesothelioma ‘asbestos cancer.’”8 Nothing of the kind is true for pesticides, which are moreover made up of both an active molecule—such as alachlor for Monsanto’s Lasso—and of various highly toxic substances which, as we have seen in the case of Paul François, are not always reported when licensing of the formulation is requested. When a sick farmer knocks on the MSA’s door seeking acknowledgment of his occupational disease, he must expect a lengthy obstacle course, often beyond his strength and resources.
The Dominique Marchal Case
Nothing better illustrates this difficult process of acknowledgment than the story of Dominique Marchal, a farmer from Meurthe-et-Moselle who participated in the Ruffec Appeal. In 1978, he established a collective farming group (Groupement agricole d’exploitation en commun, GAEC) with three associates on the 1,300-acre family farm near Lunéville. The work was carefully shared out: his uncle and his cousin took care of the cattle, his brother of sowing, and he of “crop health,” meaning the application of phytosanitary products on their fields of wheat, barley, and rapeseed.9 In January 2002, when he had a knee operation, the doctors noticed he had an abnormally elevated level of blood platelets and, after further tests, they diagnosed him with “myeloproliferative syndrome,” a disease of the bone marrow that might develop into leukemia. “Since I was the only one who treated the crops, I immediately thought of the phytosanitary products,” Dominique Marchal explained at the Ruffec meeting. “Especially because myeloproliferative syndrome is in the table of agricultural occupational diseases associated with exposure to benzene.”
Before continuing the incredible story of the farmer from Lorraine, I have to explain the French “tables of occupational diseases of the Social Security general account and agricultural account,” which can be consulted on the National Institute of Research and Safety for the Prevention of Work Accidents and Occupational Diseases (Institut national de recherche et de sécurité pour la prévention des accidents du travail et des maladies professionnelles, INRS), website. They go back to October 1919, when a law officially recognized as occupational diseases a certain number of illnesses linked to the use of lead and mercury in industrial or craft work.10 This decision came after many clinical observations of workers in factories or workshops using heavy metals like lead, whose toxicity had been known since Antiquity and had been the subject of numerous medical reports beginning in the early twentieth century. At the First National Conference on Industrial Diseases, held in Chicago in 1910, Alice Hamilton, an occupational health doctor, described the ailments affecting painters using white lead-based paints (also known as lead carbonate), now classified as lead poisoning.11 Even now, the first table of occupational diseases of the general account concerns “ailments due to lead and its compounds,” such as anemia, nephropathy, and encephalopathy, listed in the left column of the table. The middle column presents the “treatment delay time,” that is, the maximum period between the end of exposure to the risk and the first medical observation of the disease. Finally, the right column indicates the work likely to cause the ailment in question, in this case “the extraction, treatment, preparation, use, and handling of lead, lead ore, its alloys, its compounds, and any product containing it.”
Since 1919, the list of occupational diseases in the general account has lengthened considerably—it now includes 114 tables. Established by decree, they have been added as medical knowledge of the effects of occupationally used poisons used occupationally has grown. But the creation of a new table, as we shall see in Chapter 6, is the outcome of a long process often delayed by manufacturers’ maneuvering; before a chemical substance and the diseases associated with it get on the list, disease and death continue.12
A June 17, 1955, decree created the first seven tables of occupational diseases under the agricultural account, listing infectious diseases such as tetanus, leptospirosis, and brucellosis, but also some illnesses linked to arsenic (the latest revision of table 10 dealing with “arsenic and its mineral compounds” dates from August 22, 2008: additions are skin, lung, urinary tract, and liver cancer). The list now contains fifty-seven tables designating ailments associated with lead, mercury, coal tar, and wood and asbestos dust. But only two tables deal with pesticides: table 11, which concerns certain “organophosphates and anticholinesterase carbamates” (“weeding work and anti-parasite treatments of crops and plant products”), and table 13, related to “nitric derivatives of phenol” and “pentachlorophenol associated with Lindane” (for the “treatment of cut wood and timber”). As I explained earlier, the near absence of agricultural poisons in the list is tied to the difficulty of establishing a causal link between a substance and a given disease, because farmers are exposed to many different pesticides throughout their working lives.
On the other hand, as Dominique Marchal pointed out, table 19 concerns “hemopathies caused by benzene and products containing it” such as “anemia, myeloproliferative syndrome, and leukemia.”13 I will come back to the history of benzene (see Chapter 9) which, like that of lead, perfectly illustrates how the regulation of highly toxic substance can be delayed because of organized denial on the part of manufacturers, with the paid complicity of some scientists—which is also true for pesticides and for any other poison coming into contact with our food. Here, it is enough to know that originally benzene was a byproduct of coal tar, the industrial production of which began in the middle of the eighteenth century, with a growing number of uses (a solvent for the manufacture of glue and synthetic dyes, a detergent to remove grease from metals, a material used in the manufacture of synthetic rubber, plastics, explosives, and pesticides, and a gasoline additive).
Classified as a “new domestic poison” by The Lancet in 1862,14 benzene has been classified since 1981 as “carcinogenic for humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which, after years of procrastination, finally took into account the many studies showing that chronic exposure to small doses causes serious bone marrow lesions. Indeed, by the late 1920s, medical reports coming primarily from North America and Europe revealed an epidemic of aplastic anemia and leukemia among workers in contact with benzene. In October 1939, the Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology published a special issue on chronic exposure to benzene in which it listed fifty-four studies showing a link between that substance and bone marrow cancer.15
Alone Against Everyone
“I had always heard there was benzene in phytosanitary products,” Dominique Marchal said at the Ruffec meeting, “and I thought I wouldn’t have any trouble being found to suffer from an occupational disease. That was a major mistake.” His wife Catherine nodded in agreement with a knowing air. Indeed, in December 2002, the couple sent a request for acknowledgment to the MSA referring to table 19 of occupational diseases under the agricultural account. The MSA took no action on the grounds that benzene did not appear on the warning labels of the pesticides used by the farmer between 1986 and 2002, the not insignificant quantity of 250 products, the invoices for which he had been careful to preserve. Needless to say, had he been, as he would say, a “slipshod farmer,” he would have been “on his own.”
As we saw with the Paul François case, the additives in the formulation are not mentioned on the labels of cans, and when they are, it is at best under the vague name of “aromatic solvent” or “derivative of petroleum products.” Moreover, to justify its decision the MSA referred to a report prepared by Dr. François Testud, an occupational health doctor and toxicologist at the Lyon poison center, who asserted that “the petroleum hydrocarbons used to dissolve certain active ingredients have been free of benzene since the mid- 1970s. Later questioned about his gross “mistake” by L’Express, the expert, once again serving the interests of industry, punted: “It was inaccurate,” he said. “I should have indicated that benzene was not present in proportions posing a health risk.”16
Hammering the point home, the MSA pointed out that the occupational activity referred to by Dominique Marchal, the spraying of pesticides, was not on the “indicative list of work likely to cause illness” as provided in the right-hand column of table 19: “Preparation and use of varnish, paint, enamel, putty, glue, ink, cleaning products containing benzene.”
Faced with the MSA’s refusal, the Marchals decided to file a claim with the Épinal TASS; the court appointed a toxicologist, who was unable to move the case forward because he constantly came up against the same problem: the lack of data on the precise composition of the pesticides used. “I was discouraged and wanted to give it all up,” said Marchal. “But my wife didn’t want to drop it.” Catherine’s amazing story riveted the audience in Ruffec.
Convinced that benzene was indeed the cause of her husband’s serious illness, she decided to ask for help from Senator Christian Poncelet from Vosges, president of the Senate, who wrote to the National Institute of Agronomic Research (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, INRA). In a letter dated January 28, 2005, its president, Marie Guillou, refused to intervene, arguing that the “complete list of ingredients of phytosanitary products is a trade secret.”17 The president of a public institute, whose ties with pesticide manufacturers are an open secret, refused to come to the assistance of a sick farmer, invoking a “trade secret” that has no justification other than the protection of those manufacturers’ private interests.
But Catherine did not give up. Encouraged by the family lawyer, Marie-José Chaumont, she decided to conduct the investigation herself. Armed with the names of the molecules her husband had used and a pair of dishwashing gloves, she went around the neighboring farms to collect samples that she meticulously decanted into jam jars. In this way, she managed to collect sixteen “elixirs of death.” They next had to be analyzed. Several laboratories refused to carry out the delicate task, but the Chem Tox company, located in a Strasbourg suburb, agreed.18 “Half the pesticides analyzed contained benzene,” said Catherine Marchal, to the applause of the participants in the Ruffec Appeal. “From then on, we knew the case was won.”
Indeed, in its September 18, 2006, verdict the Vosges TASS classified Dominique Marchal’s myeloproliferative syndrome as an occupational disease. Following Sylvain Médard, the technician of the Picardy agricultural cooperative, he was the second pesticide user to obtain that result. The courageous decision by the Lorraine TASS opened the way for other farmers suffering from leukemia. According to Jean-Luc Dupupet, four years later four of them had been recognized as suffering from an occupational disease; one was Yannick Chenet, who made the effort to participate in the Ruffec meeting. The testimony of this farmer, who works a farm in Saujon, Charente-Maritime, made up of 148 acres of grains and 16 acres of vines for cognac production, once again stirred the audience. After developing “myeloid leukemia type 4” in October 2002, he underwent a “bone marrow transplant which was not 100 percent compatible,” he explained, speaking with great difficulty. “My body reacted against the transplant, and I now suffer from retracted tendons, scleroderma of the skin, dry eyes, and lots of other problems.” Recognized as suffering from an occupational disease in 2006, the farmer does receive a disability pension, but he has to keep his farm running and to do that he had to hire a farm worker. “All the savings we’d been able to make before my illness have been put into the business to try to save it, but my wife and I are at the end of our rope. I would like to know what my rights are to be able to get out of this situation.”19
“The only thing you can do,” answered Paul François’s lawyer François Lafforgue, “is sue the manufacturers to get financial compensation that will enable you to pay the worker you need. It’s not easy and the outcome is uncertain, but the more of you who do it, the more chance you’ll have of obtaining reparation for the harm you have suffered. That’s what happened with the asbestos victims who, by organizing and systematically suing, were finally compensated.”
“Counting the Sick and the Dead in the Morgue”
Sick farmers have not yet reached that point, not even those who went to Ruffec, because some are still fighting to be recognized as suffering from occupational diseases. The stories of Dominique Marchal and Yannick Chenet are exceptions, because their illnesses (myeloproliferative syndrome and leukemia) are found in the tables of occupational diseases appended to the Social Security Code. For all other illnesses, patients have to file what is called a request for recognition “off table,” following a usually long and trying procedure that was established in 1993. It provides that individuals considering themselves victims of an occupational disease not listed in the tables can address the Regional Committee for the Recognition of Occupational Diseases (Comité régional de reconnaissance des maladies professionnelles, CRRMP) if they have a permanent partial disability of at least 25 percent or if they are dead (in which case the request is made by the widow or the orphans). This is what Sylvain Médard did; he had the “luck” to have contracted such a rare disease, acquired mitochondrial myopathy, that its chemical origin was not too hard to demonstrate.
The CRRMPs—there is one per region—are composed of three expert doctors: the regional medical officer or his representative, a labor inspector doctor, and a university professor and/or hospital practitioner, whose task is to examine the medical file to determine whether there is a causal link between the disease and the occupational activity of the complainant. And this is where things get difficult, because for much more “banal” diseases than Sylvain Médard’s myopathy, on what grounds can the experts base their evaluation?
To be able to state with certainty that a given poison causes a given disease, the ideal thing would be to conduct an experiment in which you expose volunteers to the poison at a certain dose, for a certain period of time, to observe after a certain number of years how many contract the disease in question. Further, to avoid contamination of the human guinea pigs by other substances—which might be used by poison manufacturers to cast doubt on the relevance of the results—it would be appropriate to confine them to an isolated site throughout the length of the experiment while strictly controlling their environment. This is clearly impossible, first of all for obvious ethical reasons. After the horrors perpetrated by Nazi doctors on the victims of the extermination camps, the Nuremberg trials pointed out that this kind of experiment was a crime. And then, assuming morality did not forbid it, to be conclusive the study would have to be repeated several times, varying the profile of the human guinea pigs (age, sex, state of health), doses, length of exposure, and observation of effects (especially because the latency period for chronic diseases is estimated to be at least twenty years). Given that one hundred thousand potentially toxic molecules have been released into the environment since the end of World War II, it is not hard to imagine the magnitude of the task.
Before going any further, I would like to point out that if we have reached this point, namely, considering how best to measure the link between a serious illness and exposure to a chemical product, it is precisely because at one moment in their history humans decided that they could, with impunity, dump poisons on their fields, their factories, their houses, the water they drink, the air they breathe, and their food. And by doing this they de facto transformed the inhabitants of our planet into guinea pigs, because fifty years later we are reduced to “counting the sick and the dead in the morgue,” in the words of the American epidemiologist David Michaels, who correctly points out that it is a “very simplistic method” and “remarkable in this day and age.”20
And we have reached this point also because politicians have allowed manufacturers to lay down the law, which consists of “demanding that one prove the toxicity of their products before any regulation, which amounts to applying the principles of criminal law to substances, presuming them innocent until proven guilty,” as Geneviève Barbier and Armand Farrachi explain in their book La Société cancérigène (Carcinogenic Society). “But if the ecosystem as a whole is contaminated, it becomes impossible to isolate the responsibility attributable to one of them.”21
In the meantime, what morality forbids being practiced on laboratory humans is authorized on animals, who have paid a heavy price for the frenzied industrialization imposed by humans. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 9, for about thirty years manufacturers have been required to conduct toxicological studies to obtain marketing authorization for their products. Conducted on animals, usually rodents, the studies are supposed to test a certain number of potential toxic effects, such as carcinogenicity or neurotoxicity. The problem is that, assuming they are well conducted—which is far from being the rule (I will come back to this with the example of aspartame)—these studies are generally not considered as “sufficient proof” when it comes to extrapolating their results to human beings. The American epidemiologist Devra Davis points to this paradox in her masterful book The Secret History of the War on Cancer: “Where animal studies on the causes of cancer exist, they are often faulted as not relevant to humans. Yet when studies of almost identical design are employed to craft novel treatments and therapies, the physiological differences between animals and humans suddenly become insignificant.”22
The fact remains that in order to be able to make a decision the experts of the regional occupational disease committees (CRRMPs) require human data: before banning a product or recognizing that a sick farmer has an occupational disease, they first want to have “counted the sick and the dead in the morgue.” And that is the work of epidemiologists. According to Jean-Luc Dupupet, “Epidemiological studies are of capital importance; the MSA has relied on them to gradually recognize as occupational diseases previously neglected illnesses such as certain cancers and Parkinson’s disease.”
As Michel Gérin and his co-authors explain in Environnement et santé publique, “[E]pidemiology is traditionally defined as the study of the distribution of diseases and their determinants in human populations. . . . It does not undertake the study or definition of the mechanisms by means of which exposures act on the human organism,” but it “measures their effect,”23 in researching, for example, why some people develop cancer and others not. To do this, it has various tools that I must present briefly, because this basic knowledge is essential to understand the incredible complexity of the situation in which the unbridled industrialization of agriculture and of society as a whole has placed us. This knowledge will also help, throughout this book, to better understand the many tricks manufacturers deploy to maintain or fabricate doubt about the toxicity of their products in order to delay as long as possible their regulation or withdrawal from the market.
To determine the factors that may contribute to the emergence of a disease, epidemiologists proceed by comparison. For example, they compare a group of people suffering from a given disease, such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a cancer of the lymphatic system), to a comparable group (by height or age of the participants) of healthy people. This kind of “case-control” study is retrospective, because it relies on the memory of people with whom the scientists try to reconstitute their way of life or the substances they may have been exposed to by means of questionnaires and interviews. Often disparaged by industry, which suspects patients of adapting their memories to the needs of the investigation, case-control studies are frequently used to measure the role of pesticides in the appearance of certain diseases in agricultural populations. Another type of retrospective study, a “cohort” study, consists of comparing a group of people having undergone the same exposure to a given factor (such as grain farmers practicing chemical agriculture) to a group not having undergone that exposure, to determine which diseases are more frequent among the exposed subjects.
In the two types of study, the relative risk of developing an illness (such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) among individuals exposed to the factor studied (such as pesticides) compared to unexposed subjects is expressed as an “odds ratio” (OR), derived from statistical calculations. If an OR exceeds the number 1, which is the normal risk of an unexposed population, it means that the study has shown an increased risk among the exposed group. For example, an OR of 4 indicates that the risk is multiplied by four among the individuals exposed to the factor studied.24 In contrast, an OR lower than 1 indicates that the exposure protects against the disease in question.
Finally, to conclude for now this brief presentation, it should be noted that epidemiologists sometimes use a third type of study, known as “prospective.” Much more costly than retrospective studies but less open to question because it does not rely on participants’ memories, a prospective study begins at a time T of a population exposed to a given factor, such as a group of farm families using pesticides, and following them over several years or even decades, recording diseases when they appear. The results are compared to a control group, assumed not to be exposed to the risk factor under investigation.
This is where the principal weak point of epidemiological studies lies: whether retrospective or prospective, it is difficult to find a control group about which one is absolutely certain that it has not been exposed to the factor studied or to other factors having similar effects. “In a disease like cancer, unquestionable results are rare,” according to Geneviève Barbier and Armand Farrachi; “on one hand because the process of development of cancer is long, and on the other, because, not living in a bubble, everyone is subjected to numerous carcinogenic factors that confuse the evidence. Besides, studies compare the rate of cancer in a population exposed to an ‘expected’ rate in the general population, a terrible term that, better than any argument, lends credence to what is known as background noise and trivializes a harm from which no one escapes. The absence of results does not prove the absence of risk, but often the impossibility of bringing those results to light.”25