To the editor:
Re: Scientist: Pesticides Don’t Cause Cancer, posted online to Capital News website, Jan. 26.
To my knowledge, Dr. Len Ritter, a retired faculty member of the University of Guelph, is a toxicologist (rodent specialist).
Bear in mind that rodents such as rats have detoxification genes missing in humans.
Ritter is not an expert on human cancer. Moreover, he is notorious for promoting the industry’s self-interested point of view on pesticides and praising the work of Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency.
I am a retired federal public servant, familiar with the Ottawa pesticide approval scene. I happen to know that the PMRA employs about 350 toxicologists (rodent specialists) who have no labs of their own and fully depend on data supplied by pesticide manufacturers for their pesticide evaluations.
Thus, inconvenient data may be withheld from the PMRA by these pesticide manufacturers.
Moreover, the PMRA employs very few epidemiologists (human data specialists). Thus the pesticide assessment process associated with the PMRA can hardly be called impartial or rigorous.
I am the author of Smoking’s Innocent Victims, published in Reader’s Digest, July 1983.
In his attempt to exonerate pesticides, Ritter grossly exaggerates the percentage of cancers due to smoking.
The chemicals found in tobacco number in the hundreds and not in the thousands as Ritter maintains.
Ritter favours limiting the application of pesticides for cosmetic purposes to those done by trained applicators, which protect such applicators exclusively.
Young children and pets remain especially vulnerable to pesticide exposures.
I take issue with Ritter’s wrong-headed attitude towards organic produce as well. There is no doubt that organic produce is healthier than food contaminated by pesticide residues.
Ritter’s comment about organic produce—“Actually, he noted, organic producers have shifted their message from safety to focus on the importance of lifestyle and sustainable agriculture”—happens to be preposterous and misleading.
K. Jean Cottam, PhD
Ottawa, Ont.
