An Urgent Need to Restrict Access to Pesticides Based on Human Lethality

Agricultural pesticides account for at least 250,000 suicide deaths each year, making pesticides the single most common means of suicide worldwide [1,2]. The proportion of suicide deaths attributable to pesticide self-poisoning varies considerably across the world: in Europe and the Americas fewer than 5% of suicide deaths involve pesticides; in the Eastern Mediterranean, African, and Southeast Asian regions approximately 20%–25% involve pesticides; and in the Western Pacific region more than half of all suicides are pesticide related [1]. In aggregate, pesticide poisoning is involved in one-third of all suicides. In Sri Lanka, the site of the study by Andrew Dawson and colleagues published in this week’s PLoS Medicine [3], more than half of all suicide deaths in 2005 were due to pesticides [4].