Nickel in the air: the director of public health asked to reconsider the question

Due to “potential adverse health impacts on the population”, the president of the Quebec Association of Physicians for the Environment has asked the director of public health to seriously re-examine the standard for nickel in the air in Quebec.

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In a missive sent on April 29, Dr. Claudel Pétrin-Desrosiers asks Dr. Luc Boileau to re-evaluate the study on nickel in the air.

Dr. Pétrin-Desrosiers and the 18 regional public health departments in Quebec maintain that new scientific elements were not considered in the decision of her predecessor, Horacio Arruda.

Last week, Dr. Boileau refused to reopen his colleague’s file.

“If the patient seen by one of my colleagues has been diagnosed. There is no reason why I would say that he did not follow this well, ”said the director of public health.

This assertion startled the president of the Association. “There is reason to revise its opinion according to new elements. In medicine, when a colleague makes an assessment and the patient consults you two weeks later with new elements (…) I will have to consider them and perhaps change my diagnosis”, illustrates the doctor.

new elements

The initial report on which Dr. Arruda relied to make his recommendation indicated that there was no study determining the form of nickel that was found in the air of Quebec.

“It’s not true,” says Dr. Pétrin-Desrosiers. “We have one and it changes everything completely. We realize that the nickel we have is different from the one found in Ontario and Europe.”

Horacio Arruda would have based himself on a literature review whose expertise stopped in 2011. The Quebec Association of Physicians for the Environment completed a recent literature review which stretched until 2021.

Potentially harmful

According to the Association’s report, the atmospheric nickel present in Quebec City is neither in sulphate nor in subsulphide form, as in Ontario and Europe. Rather, it is in the form of pentlandite, a nickel and iron sulphide which could potentially be carcinogenic. “An increase in lung cancers has been reported in pentlandite miners,” the document states.

“There are plenty of unanswered questions. We did not even look at what the potential risk was, ”she pleads.

Last week, Premier François Legault said that “to be able” to manufacture batteries for electric cars and create paying jobs, Quebec had to “raise the standard to the same level as Europe.”

Quebec should, however, rely on Australia, where the standard is lower, because they process a similar nickel compound there, says the association.

“The industry has continued to flourish despite the lowering of the standard,” points out Dr. Pétrin-Desrosiers.

“Disappointing” response

Dr. Boileau briefly replied to the association that the DSQ is treating this file “with all the necessary seriousness” and that it was “monitoring attentively”.

With the “disappointing” reaction from the director of public health, Dr. Pétrin-Desrosiers “feels that the battle is lost” due to “industry pressure which is so strong.” She hopes that mayors like that of Quebec will continue to put pressure on the Minister of the Environment in order to turn the tide. “Their job is to protect the population,” she concludes.