Environment & human health: hazardous chemicals, wastes pose serious threat

Hazardous chemicals and wastes pose serious threat to environment and human health, as these substances including pesticides are contaminating our soil, water, air and food sources.
These views were expressed by Ejaz Ahmed Quershi, Secretary Ministry of Environment while inaugurating a two-day "National Consultative Workshop" on obligations and implementation status of Pakistan on chemical related environmental treaties.
He said that sustainable and safe management of chemicals and hazardous wastes had always been at the top priority of the government. He said that Ministry of Environment was acting as catalyst to bring all the stakeholders at one forum to facilitate the change for management of chemicals and wastes.
Speaking on the occasion, Khizar Hayat Khan, Joint Secretary International Cooperation (IC), Ministry of Environment said that the workshop had been organised to seek consultation and recommendations of stakeholders for developing the action plan and implementation of chemical related conventions in Pakistan in accordance with international commitments and national priorities.
The Project Manager, Syed Zaheer Ahmed Gillani, Multilateral Agreements (MEAs) Secretariat gave a presentation on the objectives of the workshop. Apprising the participants of the workshop, Gillani said that during the Second World War half a million of chemicals were known. By the end of the war the number had been increased to nearly four million.
A decade ago the Chemical Abstracts Service Register (CAS) had some 11 million chemicals record. Today it has over 21 million substances and 26 million sequence records. About 4,000 new chemicals are increasing every day. In 1930 the global production of chemicals was one million tons. Currently it is about 400 million tons. There is a tenfold increase in the last thirty years. These chemicals have about $1500 billion sales values.
World Health Organisation (WHO) projected that for the year 2000 that the number of deaths from exposures to chemicals was about 265, 000, with an incidence rate of 4.6 per 100,000 persons. It was estimated that the total number of poisoning cases was over 160 million persons from a global population of 6 billion.