- An international team of 43 scientists has called for a “paradigm shift” in toxicology and chemical regulation globally after having found severe lapses in current regulatory systems for evaluating the safety of pesticides and plastics derived from petrochemical byproducts.
- The researchers note that the full commercial formulations of common petrochemical-based pesticides and plasticizers have never been subjected to long-term tests on mammals. Only the active ingredients declared by chemical companies have been assessed for human health risks, while other ingredients have not.
- The scientists found that synthesized pesticides and plasticizers contain petroleum-based waste and heavy metals such as arsenic that can make them “at least 1,000 times more toxic” than the active ingredients alone, posing chronic disease and health threats, especially to children — claims that the chemical industry denies.
- Researchers urge lowering the admissible daily intake, or toxicity threshold, for already approved chemical compounds; long-term testing on the full formulations of new pesticides and new plasticizers; and requiring all toxicological data and experimental protocols for approved commercial compounds be made public.
An international team of scientists has issued a stark warning that current toxicology and chemical regulatory regimes are failing to protect public health and the environment from a host of toxins found in pesticides and other petrochemical-based compounds.
In an article published in November in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe, 43 researchers from five continents, including leading experts in toxicology, biology, public health and environmental sciences, began by pointing out severe lapses in current regulatory systems for evaluating the safety of products derived from petrochemical byproducts.
They note, for example, that the full commercial formulations of common petrochemical-based pesticides used in global agriculture have never been subjected to long-term tests on mammals. They also note that only the active ingredients declared by makers of pesticides and plasticizers (a type of chemical additive used to increase pliability) have been assessed for human health risks.
In fact, the full ingredient lists for these commercial chemical compounds are often proprietary — not publicly disclosed by the companies that develop them. And yet, the article’s authors found that these pesticides and plasticizers contain petroleum-based waste and heavy metals such as arsenic that could make them “at least 1000 times more toxic at low environmentally relevant doses than the active ingredients alone under conditions of long-term exposure.”
As a result of these regulatory failings, “We are facing a silent epidemic of chemical pollution,” said article co-author Angelika Hilbeck, a biologist at ETH Zürich. “Chronic diseases are surging, biodiversity is collapsing, and public trust in science is eroded by decades of conflicts of interest.”
Gilles-Éric Séralini, a researcher of pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and professor of molecular biology, endocrinology and toxicology at France’s University of Caen Normandy, led the Environment Sciences Europe article. He told Mongabay that the call for a new paradigm in toxicology regulation that he and his co-authors have penned grew out of his 30 years of research into the connection between chemical pollution and chronic disease.
In the 1990s, while trying to determine pollutant levels in healthy newborns in order to use the data as a baseline to compare with pollutant levels in breast cancer patients, Séralini was surprised to find more than 300 chemical pollutants already inside newborns. He has spent the last three decades trying to determine the origins of these pollutants and the mechanisms by which they impact human health.
“I saw that the mechanism was essentially not going through the active [ingredients] unless you put that at quite high levels that you do not reach in the real world. But at very low levels, there are other compounds than the declared active principles in the formulation,” he said.
Séralini set about determining what those mystery compounds were. “I found petroleum residues and heavy metals that were not declared [by the companies] and they were present in all pesticides.”
At the same time he was working to characterize how these pollutants might be affecting humans, Séralini was in touch with a team of lawyers representing cancer patients suing Monsanto, the U.S. maker of the widely used herbicide Roundup. He was also hired by the French ministries of environment and agriculture to assess the toxicity of pesticides. This gave him access to documents that showed the processes by which pesticides are tested and approved for commercial sale — processes that Séralini found severely flawed.
“I discovered that since the Second World War, no pesticides around the world were [fully] tested by the companies, and that the [environmental protection] agencies in the world, even in North America or Europe or Australia, are not making their own experiments. They are just reading the papers or the files that the company is giving to them,” Séralini said.
Pediatrician and epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, who was not involved in the current article, said Séralini and colleagues’ assertion that the world needs a new paradigm for toxicology regulation “is absolutely correct.”
Landrigan, a professor at Boston College in the U.S. and director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health, noted that he and his colleagues at the Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in January that spoke to many of the same issues and came to similar conclusions as the Environmental Sciences Europe article, though they approached the issues from the perspective of medical doctors.
“One of the things that’s become very clear to us who practice medicine and work in related fields is that commercial chemicals — chemicals that are in everyday use in this country — are causing disease in children,” because they are much more vulnerable to these chemical pollutants than adults, Landrigan said. “There are very solid clinical studies and epidemiologic studies that support that statement for a whole series of chemicals.”
Chronic diseases in U.S. children are rising, Landrigan explained. Asthma has tripled, he told Mongabay, cancer is up by 35%, and autism now affects one child in 36, according to the latest statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, a federal government agency, while childhood obesity has increased fourfold over the last 30 years.
“Of course, chemicals are not the only driver of those changes, but it’s quite clear that chemicals in the environment are important drivers of these changes. And we’ve got the evidence to show it,” Landrigan said. The increase in the frequency of these chronic diseases, he adds, is closely correlated with the increased outpouring of synthetic chemicals into children’s environments since World War II.
If humanity is facing a silent epidemic of chemical pollution, it’s silent for a reason, Landrigan added: “I would venture to say that it’s not known by 99% of the American public. The chemical and pesticide industry has been so effective in their lobbying that they’ve been able to keep a toothless law on the books and bring new chemicals to market with virtually no pre-market testing for toxicity.”
In the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring identified the extensive environmental harm that the insecticide DDT was doing, the chemical industry responded with outraged denial and attempts to discredit her and other scientists. More recently, it has moderated its response, calling for voluntary initiatives by companies to develop better safety protocols; urged increased industry engagement with regulators; and supported incremental change so as not to disrupt society or the economy. The chemical industry continues lobbying against strict regulation.
Séralini’s team advocates for the implementation of three measures to effect “a paradigm shift in regulation.” First, lower the admissible daily intake, or toxicity threshold, of chemical compounds already approved for commercial use by at least a factor of 100. Second, perform long-term tests on the full formulations of new pesticides and plasticizers at “environmentally relevant” (i.e., low) levels. And, finally, require all toxicological data and experimental protocols for approved commercial compounds be made publicly available.
But even this radical regulatory paradigm shift, if it were to happen, wouldn’t go far enough, said Séralini and his co-authors. The team also calls for a rapid transition to agroecology and away from intensive agricultural practices requiring heavy use of pesticides. They point to research showing that agroecological practices lead to a food supply that’s lower in petroleum residues and heavy metals.
Today, we all carry pesticides in our bodies absorbed from the food we eat and the environment we live in, Séralini said. “The good news is that there are ways to feed the world differently. We have to develop agroecology and subsidize that at least as much as intensive agriculture. If we choose to develop agroecology instead, we will change the world and we will save biodiversity and the environment.”
Banner image: Spraying pesticides on a field. Chemical pesticides have become ubiquitous in industrial agriculture, and have contributed to a rapid rise in chronic diseases, researchers say. Image by Sundaram via Pixahive (CC0).
Citations:
Séralini, G.-É., Jungers, G., Andersen, A., Antoniou, M., Aschner, M., Bacon, M.-H., … Zhang, X. (2025). Scientists’ warning: We must change paradigm for a revolution in toxicology and world food supply. Environmental Sciences Europe, 37(1). doi:10.1186/s12302-025-01217-3
The Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health. (2025). Manufactured chemicals and children’s health — The need for new law. New England Journal of Medicine, 392(3), 299-305. doi:10.1056/nejmms2409092
Tickner, J., Geiser, K., & Baima, S. (2021). Transitioning the chemical industry: The case for addressing the climate, toxics, and plastics crises. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 63(6), 4-15. doi:10.1080/00139157.2021.1979857
Séralini, G.-É., Douzelet, J., & Jungers, G. (2022). Detection of pollutants in organic and non-organic food: Are PAHs coming from pesticides? Food & Nutrition Journal, 7(238). doi:10.29011/2575-7091.100238
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