“The objective of the consultation is to see if we can make a link between your professional activity and the disease”specifies Dr Sylvain Chamot from the Amiens University Hospital (Somme) to two of his patients. A farmer suffers from leukemia. Dr Chamot questions him for an hour and a half about his agricultural practices, lists the products used and assesses the degree of exposure of professionals to pesticides. His questions sometimes shake patients.
Like a farmer who was diagnosed with cancer: “It’s complicated to say that we have something that can appear suddenly and that we may have caused by products that we have handled when it would not have been necessary”she confides, very moved. The link between his illness and the use of pesticides has been proven, but his file must still be examined by the Pesticide Victims Fund, which decides whether or not the patient can be compensated and to what extent.
Dr Sylvain Chamot does around fifty consultations with farmers per year. It also looks at cases of prenatal exposure to pesticides. He has only seen seven patients so far, but he suspects there are many more cases.
Watch the full report in the video above.
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