“It’s complicated, as a professional, to think that for thirty or forty years, we did something that ate away at our health. And besides: did it only eat away at ours? » Antoine Lambert, 52, is a farmer in Eure. Since 2020, he has also been the president of the Phyto-Victimes association, until recently the only organization in the world of agricultural workers sick with “phytosanitary products”, with the Collective in support of victims of pesticides in the West.
On the association’s website, the members of the board of directors present themselves under their name and that of their pathologies, with designations as complicated as those of the pesticides they have handled: “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma”, “multiple myeloma”… Being sick from pesticides in the agricultural world is a “taboo”, explains Mr. Lambert. But it is a reality.
Unsuitable equipment
The dangerousness of pesticides is now well established and six serious pathologies are linked to occupational exposure to pesticides, established a major Inserm report in June 2021. However, since the mid-2000s, a group of French researchers has been warning regarding the flaws in personal protective equipment sold to agricultural workers: unsuitable, little worn, expensive, often ineffective. Overalls in particular do not fulfill the protective role that has been promised to the profession. So where are the patients of “phytos”? And how many are they? In France, in Europe and elsewhere, there are no figures.
While a link between Parkinson’s disease and herbicide exposure, paraquat, was established as early as 1985, only two European Union (EU) countries – Italy and France – consider this neurodegenerative condition an official consequence of working in the fields. And, even in these countries, the number of agricultural workers who benefit from recognition as an occupational disease appears to be largely underestimated. In Italy, between 2016 and 2020, out of approximately 19,000 recognitions of occupational diseases, only ten people were compensated for Parkinson’s.
The situation is not much better in France, the first country to recognize Parkinson’s disease as an occupational disease in 2012. Out of an agricultural population of approximately 1.2 million people, 278 patients have since obtained this recognition, according to the figures that the Mutualité sociale agricole (MSA) ended up communicating to the World – following numerous reminders. The official patients with malignant hemopathies are themselves 159 since 2015. Occupational disease chart No. 61 for prostate cancer was created at the end of 2021, a few days before Christmas.
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