Title: Exposure to combination of pesticides increases childhood cancer risk – study

Exposure to multiple pesticides significantly increases the risk of childhood cancers compared with exposures to just one pesticide, first-of-its-kind research finds, raising new fears that children are more at risk to the substances’ harmful effects than previously thought.

The study examined how pesticide exposures affect children with paediatric cancer in Nebraska. Nebraska is predominantly an agricultural state, so individuals could be exposed to various pesticides through different routes of exposure.

Previous studies looked at how exposure to atrazine and nitrate in surface water affects paediatric cancers in Nebraska. This new used statistical methods that could efficiently handle a mixture of pesticides instead of a single pesticide to understand how these pesticides together contribute to paediatric cancers.

A positive associations between pesticide mixture and overall cancer, brain and CNS cancers, and leukaemia among children. Herbicides mainly contributed to these positive associations.

The results of this study can help policymakers make better decisions to protect children from pesticide exposure and reduce the paediatric cancer burden.

Taiba, J., Beseler, C., Zahid, M., Bartelt-Hunt, S., Kolok, A., & Rogan, E. (2025). Exploring the joint association between agrichemical mixtures and pediatric cancer. GeoHealth, 9.

Full-text available here



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Article: WeedsNews6769 (permalink)
Categories: :WeedsNews:research alert, :WeedsNews:health, :WeedsNews:cancerawareness, :WeedsNews:pesticide residues, :WeedsNews:pesticide drift, :WeedsNews:pesticiding
Date: 14 March 2025; 3:53:20 PM AEDT

Author Name: David Low
Author ID: adminDavid