Since 2020, molecules from the degradation of phytosanitary products are sought in tap water. According to “world” data, around 12 million people have since been affected by quality thresholds.
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The figures are striking. They reveal the extent of the contamination of water resources by pesticides and their degradation products; They also show profound gaps, lasting for many years, in drinking water surveillance. In 2021, according to data collected by Le Monde from regional health agencies (ARS), water agencies or prefectures, around 20 % of French people in metropolitan France – some 12 million people – received in the tap , regularly or episodically, water not in accordance with quality criteria. This figure was 5.9 % in 2020, according to the Ministry of Health.
Most of this data have been available to the Directorate General of Health (DGS) for several months, but so far has not been aggregated to be communicated to the public. The DGS has declined our maintenance requests. Their official presentation, scheduled for the coming weeks, promises to be delicate: in a country where the rare deviations from drinking water quality standards are, each year, presented as marginal and harmless, the current situation is as alarming as ‘unexpected. To the point of disturbing former senior health system executives.
The former director general of ARS Nouvelle-Aquitaine Michel Laforcade, retired since 2020, believes that the health authorities have “failed” on the issue of pesticides and their degradation products, metabolites. “There is a lot of self-censorship in the administration, a kind of inability to look at reality, he testifies. One day, we will have to account. It may not be the same scale as The case of contaminated blood, but it could become the next public health scandal. “
What happened? Why did the non-conformities of drinking water concern less than 6 % of French people in 2020 and around 20 % the following year? No recent and brutal acceleration of the use of pesticides, but a “knowledge shock”, according to the expression of Mickaël DErangeon, the vice-president of Atlantic’eau, the Loire-Atlantique Water Syndicate.
Hauts-de-France in the foreground
In 2021, responding to an instruction from the DGS in December 2020, regional health agencies began to monitor certain pesticide metabolites which were not previously sought after. In the environment, pesticides are fragmented and recombine with elements of the environment to give a whole chemical descendants. For each phytosanitary product put on the market, we can count up to a dozen metabolites, some being judged “relevant” by the health authorities (that is to say potentially dangerous), others “unrelevant”.
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