This page is a part of the corpus (Annexe 1) used to write Stéphane Foucart and neonicotinoids.
Here, I relate what the journalist said in his article “Le tabac et les abeilles”. All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
This article presents the method of risk assessment for honey bees defined by the document “System for the assessment of the risk of plant protection products for the environment” of the EPPO.
To be qualified as “low risk”, exposure to the substance should be less than the LD50 in less than 48 hours divided by 10. S. Foucart would show the absurdity of this method by taking the example of cigarettes for the human: the LD50 is 150 packs. Smoking 15 packs per day would therefore be, by following this logic, “at low risk” for humans …
EFSA proposed new guidelines in the summer of 2013 “based on the actual state of scientific knowledge”. Their eventual adoption, however, was postponed. [He implicitly asserts that the EPPO document would indeed be the guideline followed]