Chemical pesticides are among the tools farmers often use in managing insects dedicated to dining on our nation’s harvest. Pesticides, unfortunately, are not without risk to those who labor in the fields and orchards, planting, tending and harvesting crops. This risk increases for Mexican farmworkers, according to a study appearing online in a supplemental issue of the American Journal of Public Health. “For one thing, Mexican immigrant farmworkers’ knowledge of, and beliefs about, pesticides differ from traditional occupational health definitions, such as those of the Environmental Protection Agency,” said lead author Shedra Amy Snipes, Ph.D. The EPA, for example, defines pesticides as any substance intended for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest. Yet Snipes says that immigrant farmworkers tell her that pesticides are substances “that smell badly and are very strong.”
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