Former florist, Laure Marivain is now fighting for the memory of her daughter Emmy, struck down by leukemia in 2022 at the age of 11. A blood cancer linked to pesticides to which the mother had been exposed during her pregnancy through contact with flowers. In 2023, the compensation fund for pesticide victims recognized “the causal link between Emmy’s pathology and her exposure to pesticides during the prenatal period”, a first for a deceased child.
Denouncing “a real health scandal”, Emmy’s parents had requested in October before the Rennes Court of Appeal “full compensation” for the damage suffered by their daughter before being rejected at the beginning of December. “A terrible decision which adds even more suffering to suffering,” Laure Marivain reacted.
A mission of approximately two years
But his fight will not have been in vain because a mission “on the risks of exposure to pesticides” for florists will be carried out by ANSES, according to information from Radio France a you Monde.
This “large-scale expertise”, which should last around two years, concerns “the risks of exposure to pesticides and pesticide residues of workers in the horticultural sector of ornamental plants (cut and potted flowers) and their children”, according to the Robin des Bois association, which contacted the National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety before the ministries responsible for Labor and Agriculture did so. likewise.
For Laure Marivain, this evaluation “is a first step, but the State has been aware of the problem for a long time, at least 2017,” she reacted on Franceinfo. “They should have taken up the subject several years ago and they did nothing,” she continues, also deploring the duration of the investigation. “If we wait for this expertise to be completed, there will still be people who will get sick,” she told our colleagues.
OUR FILE ON PESTICIDES
According to the French Federation of Artisan Florists, this profession numbers some 30,000 people in France (artisans and florist traders). So many professionals who handle flowers all day long, often from Kenya or Ecuador and impregnated with pesticide residue. A study published in 2019 detected more than a hundred, most of which are banned in the European Union, in the best-selling flower bouquets.