A research project, conducted in France, has concluded that kids who live close to dense vineyards have a higher risk of contracting leukaemia because of the chemicals in the agricultural herbicides sprayed onto the vines.
French campaigners who want a 150 metre no-spray buffer zone around vineyards blame glyphosate the most common agricultural herbicide together with two fungicides used on vines: Folpet and spiroxamine.
The research team is from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research and Paris City University. They cite a moderate rise in youngsters’ chances of suffering from the disease if they live within about 0.6 of a mile from a large vineyard (within 1 km).
They identified increased risks in the main wine producing regions excepting Bordeaux. The team said there are two caveats: the increased risk was modest and they did not study the types of chemicals causing this increased risk.
However, the French public are concerned over the health impact of the country’s intensive use of pesticides.
Glyphosate is banned in France from French households and has been since 2020. The ban was a result of the World Health Organisation reporting that it probably caused cancer. But the ban does not extend to farmers and they continue to use it.
Some EU member states want to ban glyphosate entirely but French farmers helped to block the introduction of an immediate Europe-wide ban.
The researchers examined how close vineyards were to 4196 children who hadn’t suffered from the disease and worked out the area of vine-growing around the homes of 3711 children who are aged under 15.
They detected an 8% increase in the incidences of leukaemia for every 10% rise in the area of vines within a 1 km perimeter.
Stephanie Goujon, the co-author of the research, said: “We are highlighting a moderate increase in the risk of leukaemia, which encourages us to pursue our work. It should be recalled that the risk of leukaemia remains low even in zones with the most dense crops. It represents 40 cases per million children. Even with a 5% rise, the risk remains low.”
A report appears in Environmental Health Perspectives.
A campaign group, Générations Futures, believe that about 4% of the French population (2.6 million people) live less than 200 m from vineyards. They did their own research in placing sensors at different distances from vineyards in the Rhône and Bordeaux regions in 2021 and 2022. They found that the air was heavy with pesticides and dominated by fungicides. These chemicals are classed by the EU as suspected carcinogens.
