Farmworkers in the United States constitute a population at risk for serious environmental and occupational illness and injury as well as health disparities typically associated with poverty. Pesticides are a major source of occupational injury and illness to which farmworkers are exposed. Efforts to provide safety training for farmworkers have not been fully evaluated. Based on the Health Beli...

BACKGROUND The State of California maintains a comprehensive Pesticide Use Reporting Database (CPUR). The California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) maps all crops in agricultural counties in California about once every 5 years. OBJECTIVE We integrated crop maps with CPUR to more accurately locate where pesticides are applied and evaluated the effects for exposure assessment. METHODS W...

Farmers’ awareness of beneficial and harmful effects of pesticides and factors determining use of pesticides were analyzed using survey data from 21 villages in three agro-ecological regions of Bangladesh. Pesticide cost accounts for about 7.7 percent of the gross value of output in cotton, 3.6 percent in vegetables, 2.5 percent in potato, 1.8 percent in modern rice, 1.6 percent in spices and l...

BACKGROUND An association may exist between pesticide exposure and suicide. OBJECTIVE We sought to evaluate the existence of an association between pesticide use and suicide using data from the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), a prospective cohort study of licensed pesticide applicators and their spouses in Iowa and North Carolina. METHODS Via linkage to state mortality files and the Nation...

OBJECTIVE Pesticide self-poisoning accounts for one-third of suicides worldwide, but few studies have investigated the national epidemiology of pesticide suicide in countries where it is a commonly used method. We investigated trends in pesticide suicide, and factors associated with such trends, in Taiwan, a rapidly developing East Asian country. METHODS We conducted an ecological study using...

This article argues that the existing maze of pesticide policies reflects the multidimensionality of side effects of pesticide use that cannot be addressed by uniform policies. Pesticide policies will improve as (a) economic literacy among natural scientists and policymakers increases; (b) economic models of pesticide use and agricultural production in general better incorporate biological cons...