Bias Built in Feds' Pesticide Use Review: BC Doctor
Submitted by Robyn Duncan on October 13, 2011 - 12:31
Andrew MacLeod, The Tyee
There are problems with the way Health Canada assesses pesticides, allowing the use of products that harm human and ecosystem health, said Warren Bell, a Salmon Arm doctor and past founding president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
Bell was responding to comments Lyndsay Hanson, stakeholder engagement and outreach manager with the pest management regulatory agency, made Oct. 6 to a British Columbia legislative committee considering cosmetic pesticide use, reported in The Tyee.
"What Mr. Hanson does not reveal is that the overwhelming majority of evidence considered by the federal Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency... consists of what are called 'sponsored studies,'" said Bell. "This means that the researchers who have carried out the studies that are presented to the PMRA are paid by the company which is making the product they are examining." The company will have designed the experiment in a way most likely to make their product looks good, he said. And if the test goes badly for the product, the company's unlikely to forward it to the PMRA, he said.
