Jean-Noël Jouzel

Rendre visible et laisser dans l'ombre: Savoir et ignorance dans les politiques de santé au travail

B y focusing on the general ignorance concerning occupational diseases related to exposure to pesticides among farmworkers, the authors seek to understand how public policy tools used to pro- duce knowledge may paradoxically result in the obscuring of social problems. In order to do so, they rely on recent sociological studies on the dynamics of the organized ignorance. They com- plete this approach by stressing the underlying moral and political implications of this state of affairs. As such, the authors demonstrate two fac- tors contributing to the social invisibility of diseases brought about by the use of pesticides among farmworkers: the institutionalized under- recognition of chronic illnesses caused by certain forms of exposure to low doses of these toxic subs- tances; and the under-reporting by workers of the acute effects of high dose pesticide poisoning.

A Sociological Checklist for Assessing Environmental Health Risks

The contribution of social sciences to risk assessment has often been confined to dimensions of risk perception and communication. This article relates an effort to promote knowledge from the social sciences that addresses other dimensions of risk issues. A sociological checklist produced for ANSES in France helps to identify and analyse social dimensions that should be given attention during the process of risk assessment.

Governing by ignoring

Large areas of uncertainty still surround the relationship between environmental exposure to toxic materials, on the one hand, and human health, on the other. Several historical accounts have recently shown that this state of ignorance is not only due to the complex nature of the interactions between toxic agents and human bodies. Most of these accounts cast light on the strategies set up by big corporations to hide the dangers of the toxic materials they use, sell or dispose of in the environment. The cases of tobacco smoke (Proctor 2012), global warm-ing (Oreskes and Conway, 2010) and toxic chemicals (Markowitz and Rosner, 2003) provide evidence of these strategies contributing to the “social production of ignorance” over environ-mental health issues. Until now, these accounts have tended to focus on how industry draws on specific networks of scientists, politicians and experts in regulating agencies to produce doubts about the harmfulness of their products. These approaches tend to limit the role of governing bodies to that of organizations “captured” by private interests (McGarity and Wagner 2008). In so doing, they overlook the fact that for governing bodies, ignorance can have a value in and of itself. For instance, it helps the contemporary state to reduce complex issues (Scott 1998) so as to make them “governable” (Foucault 2004). Recent environmental health studies support this thesis. The cases of indoor air pollution (Murphy 2006), of pesticides’ effects on bees (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013), and of the consequences of human exposure to chemicals in the soils of post-Katrina New Orleans (Frickel and Vincent 2007), show that ignorance is a useful resource for the control of toxic chemicals in the environment. [First paragraph]

Maladies professionnelles et pesticides : les causes d’une méconnaissance

Cet article porte sur les causes de la meconnaissance des effets pathogenes des substances toxiques presentes dans l’environnement sur la sante humaine. A partir du cas des maladies professionnelles induites par les pesticides, il montre que cette meconnaissance n’est pas un simple effet de la nature des interactions entre substances toxiques et corps humain, mais est egalement le produit d’actions humaines. A rebours d’approches qui mettent en avant les strategies deliberees de « production du doute » mises en œuvre par les fabricants des produits dangereux, l’article montre que ces actions qui obscurcissent le lien entre environnement et sante peuvent paradoxalement etre le fait d’acteurs sociaux qui cherchent a faire la lumiere sur les effets pathogenes des toxiques environnementaux.

Brought to light but left in the dark: Knowledge and ignorance in occupational health policies

By focusing on the general ignorance concerning occupational diseases related to exposure to pesticides among farmworkers, the authors seek to understand how public policy tools used to produce knowledge may paradoxically result in the obscuring of social problems. In order to do so, they draw on recent sociological studies on the dynamics of organised ignorance, stressing the underlying moral and political implications of this phenomenon. The authors demonstrate two factors contributing to the social invisibility of diseases brought about by the use of pesticides among farmworkers: the institutionalised under-recognition of chronic illnesses caused by certain forms of exposure to low doses of toxic substances; and the under-reporting by workers of the acute effects of high-dose pesticide poisoning.