For most of his life, José Nadan worked as a professional beekeeper in Morbihan, a coastal area in Brittany known for its medieval towns and fresh seafood. At the start of his career, he recalls a golden age of beekeeping, when each year, and “without much effort”, the number of hives would naturally increase. But things took a turn for the worse in the19 80s, when the varroa mite made its way to France.
A parasite, the mite weakens bees by suppressing their immune system and spreading deadly viruses that can collapse entire colonies. Nadan also spent many years keeping an orchard of cider apple trees he treated with a pesticide that, he was told, was organic and had no effect on humans. But I wasn’t worried.” “I later found out it was a product like Roundup [a Monsanto weed killer] and contained glyphosate,” he says, a substance now known to beharmful to human health.
It was only after he retired that Nadan realised the consequences of being exposed to pesticides for all those years. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His illness has officially been recognised as an occupational hazard caused by pesticides by France’s agricultural social security system.
Pesticides are known to cause arange of health issues, including various types of cancer, respiratory diseases, neurodegenerative illnesses like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer's, cardiovascular diseases and infertility. They also impact children more than adults, leading to developmental delays and cognitive impairments. A2023 studyin which hundreds of samples were gathered from different environments across 10 European countries found that pesticides were present in 100% of air, indoor dust and water samples.
Read morePesticides, cadmium, PFAS: France reckons with the hidden toxins in food (1/2) Edmond Leduc, a retired doctor living close to the Belgian border in northern France, has lived next to crop fields treated with pesticides for 44 years. As one of Europe’s biggest agricultural producers, France is also one of its largest consumers of pesticides. And the number of requests by agricultural workers like Nadan, who are in close contact with the toxic substances, has shot up from318 in 2024to975 in 2025.
Yet as the toll of pesticide exposure is becoming clearer, the EU is preparing to vote on a set of legal amendments that could make it harder to ban these harmful products. Despite having amulti-layered systemto assess the risk of pesticides, Europe still sees cases where they cause harm to both the environment and humans. Unlike the US, which uses a risk-based model that factorsactual levels of exposure, the EU uses ahazard-based model, meaning it focuses on the inherent toxicological properties of a certain chemical before it’s approved.
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