Public conviction with no scientific evidence: undone popular epidemiology and the denunciation of the health effects of pesticides in a French apple-growing region

ABSTRACTPopular epidemiology refers to processes in which a group of individuals collects, produces, and analyses heterogeneous data, in order to prove the negative effects of specific economic activities or infrastructures on their health and the environment. Despite the attention they receive, social movements that engage in popular epidemiology seldom come into being and, if they do, are often abandoned before they achieve their goal. This article draws on a qualitative sociological investigation carried out in a French region, where for many years, the development of industrial agriculture has led to concerns regarding the impact of pesticides on the population’s health. It describes the emergence of a protest movement and analyses the factors that encouraged this movement to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the toxicity of pesticides and to devote few resources to scientific activities. More generally, this article suggests that taking into account the national structuration of environ...