The Canadian government, lacking legislation for examining any adverse effects of pesticides, relies on manufacturers to supply such evidence. Rationale for a CAPE position statement As a result of the unquestioning trust that the population at large has placed in the scientific community, the commercial sector and regulatory agencies in the past, pesticides have become dispersed on a massive scale throughout our global ecosystem, without adequate testing for adverse effects in humans. In what has been called a massive, uncontrolled, global biochemical experiment, they are now essentially universal in surface waters, soils and biological systems. Because of their fundamentally toxic nature, pesticides are unlikely to be absolved of their demonstrated negative role in the health of humans and biological systems in general. In fact, it can be logically inferred that their deleterious impact will eventually be shown to be far more extensive than what is known at present, because so much research has yet to be done on the full range of toxicity potentialities.
Physicians are ill-trained to diagnose the adverse effects of pesticide exposures.
Because there is no mandatory requirement for reporting actual or suspected pesticide poisonings, little confidence can be placed in many aspects of estimates of the public health effects of pesticide accumulation in local or regional ecosystems. However there is growing evidence that the health of future generations may be severely harmed by pesticides, alone or in combination with other toxic chemicals now permeating the global ecosphere. The fetus and the newborn child, in particular, appear to be uniquely sensitive to the harmful effects of pesticides and other toxins. Children, it has often been said, are not simply small adults. They are beings with uniquely vulnerable physiological processes.