10/07/2007
An article in the July issue of Santé et travail magazine sounds a warning about agricultural workers’ exposure to pesticides. It reports two recent French studies’ claims that farmworkers are at high risk of developing particular kinds of tumour from regular contact with pesticides, and that protective equipment is not helping keep them safe.

The first study, in the Gironde region of south-west France, found that people with the highest exposure to pesticides were at 2.2 times greater risk than the general population of developing a brain tumour. The risk of developing Parkinson's disease was also found to be high.

The findings of a second study done in the same region on a population of wine growers are more worrying still. They show that vineyard workers come into skin contact with significant amounts of pesticides that enter their bodies. The study found that 99% of poisoning was through skin contact compared to just 1% through inhalation.

The study’s authors go further, making the highly controversial claim that workers who wear “protective” one-piece overalls generally take higher doses of poison than those who do not! Surely some mistake? No, actually. The fault lies with the personal protective equipment (PPE), which the French researchers claim is unsuited to agricultural use. The one-piece overalls used by the vineyard workers were actually designed for industry, and tests have shown that although meeting legal leak-tightness standards they still allow the full range of weedkillers produced by a large laboratory to seep through in under ten minutes.

Thinking that they are effectively protected, wearers tend to take less care, argue the study’s authors. Also, the PPE may be contaminated when put on due to poor maintenance or storage, or being kept in unclean conditions.

The French researchers argue that these failings make the case for PPE that are more suited to the reality of work situations, but even more so for replacing toxic products by others which are not or are less dangerous.

Source: Pesticides: menace sur les agriculteurs, Santé et travail, n°59, July 2007