The Rural Voice, 1999-01, Page 12TIGER
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RIME
STOPPERS
1 -800 -222 -TIPS
Robert Mercer
Your car, your food, your chemicals
Scare campaigns suggest to the
uninitiated that the risks caused by
pesticides are far worse than those of
driving your car which we all do
without a second thought every day.
They're not.
Well, even the
Globe and Mail
recognizes that
risk is also a
factor of usage
and dosage. Their
editorial of
November 21
shows a table of
"lifetime risks of
dying" compiled
by James Walsh
in which he
shows a factor of
one in six for
death cause by
disease from
smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
The risk of dying from a motor
accident he says is one in sixty, while
the risk of dying from pesticide
poisoning is one in 200,000.
This quiet reminder suggested to
me that it might be worth exploring
this consumer misconception further
to see if there are other facts that
farmers and farm families can use to
offset media and public ignorance
about one of their farm input products.
One source of statistics often used
and misquoted are those from Health
Canada on Poison Control statistics.
The most recent that I have available
are for 1987 where the report shows
75,995 cases of poisoning in Canada
that year. These resulted in 454
GP
0CAND 59 -
Marvin L. Smith
B.Sc.F. (Forestry), R.P.F.
Farm Woodland Specialist
765 John St. West
Listowel, Ontario N4W 1B6
Telephone: (519) 291-2236
Providing advice and assistance with:
• impartial advicei'assistance in selling timber,
Including selection of trees and marking
• reforestation of erodible or idle land
• follow-up tending of young plantations
• windbreak planning and establishment
• woodlot management planning
• diagnosis of Insect and disease problems
• conducting educational programs In woodlot
management
• any other woodland or tree concerns
8 THE RURAL VOICE
deaths. Of these poisonings, six were
attributed to pesticides.
Now, the clincher with these
results is that if we stop at this point
we get the wrong impressions. Of
those six deaths five were voluntary
suicides. The other was an involuntary
accident.
The other risk/reward example I
like, comes from the Crop Protection
Institute and it demonstrates the
importance of dosage in relationship
to risk in the food we eat or drink.
If we just go down the street to
Mabel's Grill (you will find that form
of establishment in any rural town or
over the page in this magazine) you
will find people talking over a cup of
coffee. You can die from drinking too
much coffee. In fact if you drink three
cups a day you are ingesting 120,000
mg of caffeine a year. A fatal dose of
caffeine is 20,000 mg if all taken at
once. Reality shows that the risk of
dying from caffeine poisoning is
virtually nil. So the public accepts that
risk and continues on drinking coffee.
In the case of agricultural
chemicals the risk compared to this
example of the coffee drinker is 3,000
times less.
Finally, in this comment over the
bad press that ag-chemicals get, (and
I'm not defending them or the
corporate structures that manufacture
them, but rather just trying to state a
case to those who will listen with an
open mind) their use can be said to be
beneficial not detrimental from a ,
health standpoint.
Agricultural chemicals when used
properly, whether they are herbicides,
fungicides or pesticides, help make
fruits and vegetables more available to
more people for more of the year at
prices that reflect the ample supply
not a shortage. Thus more people have
the opportunity to eat them. These
fruits and vegetables are our strongest
weapon in our fight against cancer. It
is proven that five servings a day will
cut a person's cancer risk by 50 per
cent, thus dwarfing any theoretical
cancer risk from pesticide residues.0
Robert Mercer was editor of the
Broadwater Market Letter and a farm
commentator in Ontario for 25 years.