Father of sick child highlights alarming health risk to your five-a-side game on a 3G pitch

It's been claimed that the rubber pellets on a 3G pitch are a carcinogenic.

A former NHS boss thinks that playing on a 3G surface might have contributed to his teenage son's cancer. Nigel Maguire, from England, wants a review into the pitches and to stop building 3G areas until research has actually been done to prove that there are no health risks with them. His 18-year-old son, Lewis, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma and the bits of rubber that skim off the surface and you find in your boots afterwards is being linked to the sickness. In an interview with the BBC, Maguire said that he fears the cancer was caused by 3G pitches. "Lewis would be training on this stuff once or twice a week for four or five years, and he would come back telling me how he swallowed a lot of it, how it got into his eyes, and in cuts and grazes," the father said. "I didn't think anything of it, one wouldn't, would you? You'd think if something that was licensed to be put on turf it would be thoroughly researched. The reality is that it hasn't." The Sports and Play Construction Association played down the fears by stating: "Numerous research studies [have been] carried out worldwide. The current consensus is that the rubber crumb poses no significant health risk." The 3G pitch is the same surface they use at Oriel Park, home of League of Ireland champions Dundalk. And it's the same surface they use for just about every five-a-side league around the place nowadays. It has been reported that a new $2m review of the pitches has begun in American and Nigel Maguire wants the same to be done closer to home because he can't find the research that proves there is absolutely no risk with these pitches. "The industry turns around and categorically says that it's perfectly fine," he said in the same interview. "They've done the research, 'we have tested it for emissions for any gasses that come off it and there are none'. That's fine, however, there is no research that I can find - and I've scanned and scanned - that says actually if you ingest this, if you rub this stuff into your wounds that contain these known carcinogens, there is no effect. "I'm asking for similar review to be undertaken by our government [UK] to look at the available evidence, to commission research and look at the health impact."