If you require immediate medical attention, call 911. If you are experiencing symptoms, consult the First Aid instructions on the product label and contact your health care provider or a Poison Control Centre.
For environmental emergencies, contact your local authorities
or the Canadian Environmental Emergency Notification System.
All pesticides are tested and evaluated for safety before being registered for use by Canadians. To continue to monitor for safety after they are registered, Health Canada collects pesticide incident reports from Canadians.
If you are a pesticide registrant or applicant, please consult the Mandatory Pesticide Incident Reporting for Registrants and Applicants section.
A pesticide incident is a negative effect (adverse reaction) to humans, animals (pets or livestock) or the environment (plants or wildlife) that can result from being exposed to a pesticide.
Pesticide incidents include:
You do not have to be certain that a pesticide caused the effect in order to report it.
There are two ways you can report a pesticide incident:
The four types of incident reporting forms for the public are:
For help in filling out the forms, please contact our Pest Management Information Service. Refer to these definitions for further information.
All pesticide incident reports submitted to us are made available to the public on our website through our Public Registry. Personal information is removed from a report before it is posted.
We use all available information to assess if the pesticide was the cause of the reported effect. If so, we assess what the risk to Canadians is and how similar incidents can be prevented. We do this by attempting to answer these questions:
Health Canada could conclude that an effect is unrelated to a pesticide, or that it is unlikely, possible, probable or highly probable that the effect was caused by a pesticide. Sometimes the results of our evaluation of an incident may be inconclusive due to insufficient information. For example, many of the symptoms commonly reported, such as headache, nausea and coughing can be due to causes other than being exposed to a pesticide.
If we do indentify an issue, actions taken can include:
To report a problem with another type of product (for example, drugs or cosmetics), please visit the Healthy Canadians website.
For more information on pesticides, please contact our Pest Management Information Service.