Only a European way of seeing things ...

Kind regards,

Ghislain De Roeck,
Belgium.


http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/supporting/pub/497e.htm


The present document has been produced and adopted by the bodies identified
above as author(s). This task has been carried out exclusively by the
author(s) in the context of a contract between the European Food Safety
Authority and the author(s), awarded following a tender procedure. The
present document is published complying with the transparency principle to
which the Authority is subject. It may not be considered as an output
adopted by the Authority. The European Food Safety Authority reserves its
rights, view and position as regards the issues addressed and the
conclusions reached in the present document, without prejudice to the rights
of the authors.

Published on: 18 October 2013 
We performed a systematic and extensive literature review of epidemiological
studies examining the association between pesticide exposure and any health
outcome published after 2006. We searched 43,259 citations and identified
603 published articles examining a very wide variety of outcomes and
presenting over 6,000 analyses between pesticide exposure and health
outcomes. We divided the different outcomes into 23 major disease
categories. The largest proportion of studies pertains to cancer outcomes
(N=164) and outcomes related to child health (N=84). The majority of studies
were case-control studies and cross-sectional studies (N=222) and examined
occupational exposure to pesticides (N=329). A wide and diverse range of
pesticides was studied with studies using various definitions of pesticides;
it is very hard to harmonise between studies this information. Despite the
large volume of available data and the large number (>6,000) of analyses
available, firm conclusions cannot be made for the majority of the outcomes
studied. This observation is disappointing especially when one accounts for
the large volume of research in the area. However, this observation is in
line with previous studies on environmental epidemiology and in particular
on pesticides which all acknowledge that such epidemiological studies suffer
from many limitations and that the heterogeneity of data is such that does
not allow firm conclusions to de made. We also performed updated
meta-analysis for major outcomes and for those where a relevant
meta-analysis published after 2006 was identified. This has only been
possible for childhood leukaemia and for Parkinson's disease. For both these
outcomes we found significant associations between pesticide exposure and
disease in line with previous evidence.

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