[Glyphosate and human health]. / Glyphosate et santé humaine, une plongée en eaux troubles.

At this time of environmental crisis, pesticides represent a major threat to the environment and to human health alike. The widely used herbicide glyphosate is suspected of acting as a mutagen, a carcinogen as well as a neurotoxic substance for the professionals who use it. This possibly also holds true for the population at large. Despite increasing warnings from the independent scientific community, this product was granted provisional registration for Europe in 2017, and the decision has been postponed to 2022 with a report on the decision by that date. In fact, EU and US public authorities - who in theory are guarantors of public health - seem to put up with biased expert committees, falsification of science and attacks against a WHO health protection agency, as they keep relying on administrative pseudo-science as a basis for their decisions.

À l'heure de la crise environnementale, les pesticides sont la cause d'une atteinte majeure à l'environnement et à la santé humaine. Le glyphosate, herbicide très répandu, est soupçonné d'être un mutagène, un carcinogène et un neurotoxique pour les professionnels qui l'utilisent et peut-être aussi pour la population générale. Malgré les alertes toujours plus nombreuses du monde scientifique indépendant, ce produit a obtenu son homologation provisoire pour l'Europe en 2017 et la décision prévue en 2022 a été reportée. Les pouvoirs publics de l'Union européenne et des États-Unis ­ garants en principe de la santé publique ­ semblent s'accommoder de comités d'experts sous influence, de falsification de la science et d'attaques contre une agence de protection sanitaire de l'OMS et s'appuient sur une pseudoscience administrative pour fonder leurs décisions.

[If you go looking for trouble you'll find it. Urticarial reactions to insects of our local areas]. / "Qui s'y frotte s'y pique": réactions urticariennes aux insectes de nos regions.

Itchy skin rashes are a frequent reason to seek medical advice. The symptoms may be caused by hypersensitivity reactions to arthropod bites, waterborne parasites or setae from moth caterpillars and are sometimes mistaken for spontaneous urticaria or eczema. Some of these pests are resurging in Switzerland and elsewhere and increasingly responsible for emergency consultation. In this article we review itchy skin rashes caused by bed bugs, scabies, lice, cercariae, Pyemotes spp, caterpillars and harvest mites, which may be confounded with urticaria and allergic contact dermatitis. We detail here clinical manifestations, topographical distribution of skin lesions, epidemiology, treatment and preventive measures.