Dangerous Exposure: Farmworker Children and Pesticides
Friday, May 20, 2011 at 9:24AM
Chris Liu-Beers in Peer-reviewed, children, pesticides

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Children of farmworkers bear a disproportionate burden of health effects from pesticide use in our country. Birth defects, neurological complications, respiratory illness, and cancers have all been linked by peer-reviewed research to pesticide exposure in children. This publication reviews research found on the effects of pesticides on these four areas related to children’s health. The information compiled here is a tool for consumers, policy-makers, health and safety trainers, advocates, those who serve farmworkers, and those who benefit daily from their hard work. 

Pesticide exposure occurs at work in the fields and also at home. Farmworkers may bring their families into contact with pesticides inadvertently through their clothes or unsafe storage of chemicals. However, thousands of children all over the country are more directly exposed to pesticide residues while they labor in fruit, vegetable, and flower crops. Discriminatory laws exempting farmworker youth from safe working conditions as they harvest on farms put them at particular risk for contact with these chemicals. Parents in farm work, who largely earn below a living wage, often opt for their children to work with them in the fields in order to provide the basics for the family. Whether exposed through parents’ field work or their own, children who develop illnesses as a result of pesticide exposure pay the price for our demands for cheap food. Coupled with the concerns of farmworker parents in their own voices about pesticide exposure, the following findings demonstrate that the health of these children is at stake.

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Article originally appeared on Farmworker Advocacy Network (http://ncfan.org/).
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