ABSTRACT
Pesticide exposure poses a substantial health threat to farmworkers and their families. The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) estimates 10,000 to 20,000 physician-diagnosed cases of acute pesticide exposure occur every year among the nearly 2 million farmworkers in the US. Acute pesticide exposure with high doses can have severe health consequences, including coma and death, whereas low dose exposure can result in skin irritation and gastrointestinal upset. As is frequently the case, however, official counts of physician-diagnosed pesticide poisoning overlook the unknown number of farmworkers chronically exposed to low doses of pesticide. Chronic low dose exposure is particularly pernicious because of the unknown long-term health effects to the worker; asthma (Hoppin et al., 2008), diabetes (Montgomery et al., 2008), cancer (Clapp, Jacobs and Loechler, 2008), Parkinsons disease (Ascherio et al., 2006; Gorell et al., 1998; Kamel et al., 2007), Alzheimer’s disease (Miller and O’Callaghan, 2008), sterility (Meeker et al., 2008), and spontaneous abortion (Frazier, 2007) are all believed to be partially caused by pesticide exposure. Moreover, pesticides are frequently and unknowingly carried into the home on farmworkers’ bodies and clothes, thereby exposing family members, including young children, to these toxic agents.
