The *Associated Press *recently investigated the exposure of California schoolchildren to drifting pesticide sprays:
On Grandparents Day, Domitila Lemus accompanied her 8-year-old granddaughter to school. As the girls lined up behind Sunnyside Union Elementary, a foul mist drifted onto the playground from the adjacent orange groves, witnesses say. Lemus started coughing, and two children collapsed in spasms, vomiting on the blacktop.
She and the little girls have since recovered without apparent lasting effects. But an Associated Press investigation has found that over the past decade, hundreds, possibly thousands, of schoolchildren in
California and other agricultural states have been exposed to farm chemicals linked to sickness, brain damage and birth defects. The family of at least one California teenager suspects pesticides caused her death.
The story is a good start on a complicated subject. The folks over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker would like a bit more epidemiology, which is fair, though the epidemiology's bottom line
("farm chemicals linked to sickness, brain damage and birth defects")
is pretty clear. Another line:
Research on pregnant women exposed to common pesticides has suggested higher rates of premature birth, and poor neurological development and smaller head circumferences among their babies.
What's really unnerving, though, is that pesticide exposure starts early and frequently. A recent Spanish study of 308 pregnant women found found that every single woman had hormone-disrupting pesticides in her placenta -- the source of nutrients for babies at their most developmentally sensitive stage.
According to María José López, "we do not really know the consequences of exposure to disruptive pesticides in children, but we can predict that they may have serious effects, since this placenta exposure occurs at key moments of the embryo’s development". [...]
The UGR researcher underlines the fact that, in spite of "inadvertent exposure", "it is possible to control pesticide ingestion by means of a proper diet, which should be healthy and balanced, through consumption of food whose chemical content is low. Moreover, daily exercise and the avoidance of tobacco (which could also be a source of inadvertent exposure) are very important habits which help to control the presence of pesticides in our organisms.
AP: Children Face Exposure to Pesticides [Associated Press]
100 percent of pregnant women have at least one kind of pesticide in their placenta [press release]
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Image: Colin Palmer*
