Tighter safety standards on combining pesticides are needed to ensure they don't produce a toxic chemical cocktail for fruit and vegetable eaters, a visiting British scientist says.
David Coggon, who will be speaking at the Asian Conference of Occupational and Environmental Health in Wellington this week, said the long-held belief
that the levels of chemical residue in a crop were the same for each vegetable or fruit had been proven incorrect.
"There has been concern in the UK and US that when people are exposed to pesticides in combination they may have more serious effects than when they are encountered individually," he said.
The professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Southampton's epidemiology unit is calling for safety standards for pesticides to be tightened.
"Over the past 15 years, research has shown that within a crop, for example apples or carrots, there can be a variation in the amount of residue," he said.
"So a person may eat an apple that has a higher chemical residue than was previously estimated ... old risk assessment systems did not take that into account."
The effect of these "chemical cocktails" - which occur when pesticides used on different fruit and or vegetables combine to create a potential for poisoning - was something regulatory bodies were investigating, Professor Coggon said.
"People need to be aware that risk assessment for pesticides is a stringent and wide-ranging process.
"We are trying to improve it all the time."
- NZPA
