'Pesticides are what is killing our kids'

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'Pesticides are what is killing our kids'

Rural PEI is an unlikely hotbed of rare cancers, and one doctor has

made it his mission to raise awareness about the potential health

hazard posed by pesticides used on the region's potato farms. It's a

controversial viewpoint, reports MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, but it has

spurred the province to launch a probe

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

 

>From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

 

KENSINGTON, PEI - The countryside surrounding this small community

near the centre of Prince Edward Island is picture-postcard perfect.

Neatly tended farm fields devoted to the island's famed potatoes are

interspersed with clapboard homes, imagery seemingly taken straight

from the pages of Anne of Green Gables.

 

It is perhaps because of the province's appearance as a bucolic rural

idyll that Ron Matsusaki had the biggest shock of his professional

career when he moved to the island three years ago. The affable

57-year-old doctor was taken aback by all the rare cancers he began

noticing. The illnesses seemed more like what might be expected near a

hazardous waste site.

 

" Nowhere, nowhere did I see cancer that in any way resembles the

cancers that I saw when I came to PEI, " Dr. Matsusaki said. " I was

totally dumbfounded. "

 

In short order after his arrival, he came across an osteosarcoma that

led to the heart-wrenching death of a young girl, several lymphomas, an

Ewing's sarcoma, and a number of myeloid leukemia cases, all among

children. Brain cancers weren't sparing young and middle-aged adults

either, with three of them last year.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps because he arrived with the fresh eyes of a newcomer, Dr.

Matsusaki was sufficiently alarmed that he started to speak out

publicly about this rash of unusual cancers and his suspicion that the

blame for them lies with one of the island's economic mainstays, potato

farming, and its promiscuous use of pesticides.

 

This view -- that exposure to pesticides and other everyday

environmental pollutants is a big source of the cancer epidemic

sweeping Canada -- is one of the most controversial subjects in cancer

causation. It stands to reason that poisons used to kill bugs and weeds

might pose a risk to people, but the research picture linking

pesticides to cancer has been mixed.

 

Many studies, but not all, on the health of residents of farming areas

have found associations between crop sprays and cancer. But this

research, known as epidemiology or the tracking of disease incidence,

is considered less conclusive than the medical evidence on such

well-known carcinogens as cigarette smoke, asbestos fibres and radon

gas.

 

Researchers think that about 80 to 90 per cent of all cancers are due

to environmental causes broadly defined to include lifestyle factors

such as smoking and diet. It's far harder to tease out just how much is

due to polluted air, water or food, or to radiation or workplace

exposures to cancer-causing substances. One recent estimate of the

impact of pollution placed the total cancers due to this factor at

about 8 to 16 per cent.

 

At the high end of the range, this would suggest that about 25,000

people in Canada getting cancer this year might owe their misfortune to

pollution.

 

Prince Edward Island would be a good place to shed more light on the

health effects of agricultural chemicals because areas such as

Kensington have some of the highest airborne concentrations of

pesticides around farm fields in the world, and a sizable rural

population literally living on the doorstep of the spraying.

 

After Dr. Matsusaki began to voice his concerns, the province decided

to launch an investigation to check whether Islanders have recently

been more afflicted by cancer than people elsewhere in Canada. The

Department of Health is expected to make the new cancer review public

late this year, says Dr. Linda Van Til, an epidemiologist with the PEI

government.

 

In an e-mailed statement to The Globe, she said previous monitoring by

the Canadian Cancer Society and the federal government has found cancer

rates on the island are " slightly higher " than the national average,

although she added that this may reflect the broader national trend of

having more cancers in the East and lower rates in Western Canada.

 

It is possible the flurry of cancers observed by Dr. Matsusaki has been

just an unlucky coincidence. Even with extremely rare cancers, there is

always a small statistical probability that a few people living in

close proximity to each other will develop them around the same time by

chance.

 

Dr. Matsusaki, nicknamed " Dr. Ron, " worked for two decades in the U.S.

before returning in 2003 to his native Canada, where he had received

his medical training. After a career at hospitals and clinics in Texas,

Alabama and Indiana, he was convinced he'd seen everything a doctor

might reasonably be expected to come across -- until he came to PEI.

 

On the island, he's working as an emergency-room physician and on-call

doctor at the Western Hospital, a small 25-bed institution serving a

farming community of about 14,000 people at the island's western tip.

He says one of his first clues that something might be amiss were the

two sarcomas, both bone-related cancers, discovered in children within

a year of each other in this small population.

 

 

History repeats itself

and each time the price gets higher