The Ecologist reported recently that three French farmers have successfully sued chemical companies for cancer and Parkinson’s disease that resulted from their occupational use of pesticides–an issue as widespread as it is under-reported. A cereal farmer with 100,000 hectares of land in in the Vosges region, Dominque Marchal was the first farmer to have his leukemia associated with his daily pesticide use. His wife was determined to get to the bottom of the issue. From the Ecologist:

She employed a lawyer to help her gather the scientific evidence and herself set about gathering invoices and receipts to list which pesticides her husband had been using in previous years. Then, from their own pesticide stocks and with the help of neighbouring farms, she was able to gather samples of each of the potential cancer-causing substances. Her lawyer helped her find a laboratory willing to analyse the contents, and when the results came back they showed that 40 per cent contained benzene, a substance not marked on any of the contents labels but that is known to increase the risk of leukaemia.

No farmer has succeeded in taking on Big Chem for their illnesses in the U.S. because it is especially difficult to get medical recognition for the disease-occupation correlation, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence that exposure to certain pesticides increases the risk of illness. Read more