Synergistic health effects between chemical pollutants and electromagnetic fields

Abstract

Humans and ecosystems are exposed to highly variable and unknown cocktail of chemicals and radiations. Although individual chemicals are typically present at low concentrations, they can interact with each other resulting in additive or potentially synergistic mixture effects. This was also observed with products obtained by radiation actions such as sunlight or electromagnetic fields that can change the effects of chemicals, such as pesticides, and metal trace elements on health. Concomitant presence of various pesticides and their transformation products adds further complexity to chemical risk assessment since chronic inflammation is a key step for cancer promotion. Degradation of a parent molecule can produce several by-products which can trigger various toxic effects with different impacts on health and environment. For instance, the cocktail of sunlight irradiated sulcotrione pesticide has a greater cytotoxicity and genotoxicity than parent molecule, sulcotrione, and questions about the impact of photochemical process on environment. Adjuvants were shown to modify the biological features of pesticides. Addition of other elements, metals or biological products, can differently enhance cell toxicity of pesticides or electromagnetic radiations suggesting a synergy in living organisms. Electromagnetic fields spreading, pesticide by-products and mixtures monitoring become greater for environmental contamination evaluations.