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UC Agricultural Health & Safety Center at Davis

AgHealthNews

Issue Number 1999-03
Summer 1999

Published by the UC Agricultural Health & Safety Center at Davis, University of California, Davis, Marc Schenker, M.D., M.P.H., Director, Produced by EditPros, Davis, CA

 

1999-03-01 Table of Contents

1999-03-02 Welcome and Introduction

1999-03-03 California and Hawaii plan outreach to immigrant communities

1999-03-04 Center provides start-up funds for three new projects

1999-03-05 Managing the health risk on your dairy

1999-03-06 Safe Work/Safe Kids

1999-03-07 CIRS Executive Director retires after 22 years

AgHealthNews is an electronic version of the Center's quarterly newsletter. The Center has two electronic list servers that allow automatic forwarding of e-mail to a list of subscribers. One server is a forum for announcements and discussion of agricultural health and safety issues and the other is a vehicle for the automatic distribution of the Center's quarterly newsletter.

The e-mail addresses for the forum is: aghealth@epm.ucdavis.edu (message forwarding address) and aghealth-request@epm.ucdavis.edu (subscriber request address). The addresses for the newsletter are: aghealthnews@oem.ucdavis.edu (message forwarding address) and aghealthnews-request@oem.ucdavis.edu (subscriber request address).

To subscribe to a list, send an e-mail message to the request address with no subject and a one line message giving the option subscribe and your name. For example, to subscribe to the forum for announcements and general agricultural health and safety issues, you would send the following: To: aghealth-request@epm.ucdavis.edu Subject: Message: subscribe (your name here)

By return e-mail you will receive confirmation of your request and more information about using the list server request functions.

To subscribe to the On-line News, your request would look like: To: aghealthnews-request@oem.ucdavis.edu Subject: Message: subscribe (your name here)

The Pesticide Applicator Training (PAT) Program in Hawaii and its counterpart in California, the Pesticide Education Program (PEP) at UC Davis, headed by statewide PAT coordinators Barry Brennan and Patrick O'Connor-Marer, will team up to conduct language-specific pesticide safety training among Southeast Asian and Filipino immigrant farming communities in California and Hawaii. The goal of the outreach--which will be modeled after PEP's successful train-the-trainer workshops--is to reduce pesticide illnesses and injuries by overcoming language and cultural barriers that prevent effective, comprehensive and ongoing pesticide safety training within these communities.

PAT programs nationwide have a federal mandate to extend pesticide safety information and training. Until now, the focus of this training in California and Hawaii has been chiefly on certified commercial and private applicators who use the more hazardous restricted-use pesticides and on Worker Protection Standard training and certification. This new collaboration is the first major opportunity to leverage PAT efforts in California and Hawaii to extend this training to very large populations of non-certified pesticide users.

Concern about reaching Southeast Asian farming communities with pesticide safety information and training in these two states is not new. Center investigators have worked on a number of outreach efforts in the past several years. (See articles in Volume 5, No. 3 and Volume 8, No. 4 of the News.) In Hawaii the PAT program has con-ducted several outreach efforts to Southeast Asians and Filipinos since the late 1970s, including developing and using visual training media in Ilocano (one of the Filipino languages) and providing basic pesticide safety education for limited English-speaking Southeast Asian farmers.

In 1997 PAT Coordinator O'Connor-Marer, who is also the Center's outreach coordinator, and Center Director Marc Schenker visited Hawaii to explore how the two states might collaborate on common pesticide safety and regulatory problems. Personnel at the Hawaii Department of Agriculture expressed concern that among Southeast Asian and Filipino farming communities in Hawaii, language and cultural differences, combined with lack of knowledge about pesticides and the laws governing them, were creating problems for regulatory agencies there--some of the same problems that are being experienced in California. As an outgrowth of these and subsequent conversations, Brennan and O'Connor-Marer decided to work together to develop training materials and conduct community-based train-the-trainer workshops to reach these communities. Other participants in this outreach will include Center investigator Desmond Jolly, director of the UC Small Farm Center; PEP staff members; specific UC farm advisors and personnel from the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.

Of great concern in both California and Hawaii are health risks to which these growers and their families may be exposed through their use of pesticides to manage pests on their crops. Although pesticide use is highly regulated in California and Hawaii, as well as in the rest of the United States, many of these farmers are unaware of these legal restrictions. Literacy and language barriers often prevent them from reading and understanding the important safety information on pesticide labels. Both language and cultural barriers inhibit adequate access to educational and regulatory resources. As a result, these farmers may not understand the require-ments for personal protective equipment, restricted-entry intervals, pre-harvest limitations, plant-back restrictions and other safety measures that lower the risk of exposure to themselves and others. In addition, many may not recognize that each pesticide must be registered for use on specific crops and that applying one of these materials to a crop for which it is not registered is illegal and may expose consumers to harmful residues.

The great promise of this new outreach is that it will be community-based. It will respect existing avenues of authority, communication and trust within these communities by obtaining cooperation of Southeast Asian and Filipino community leaders and organizations. Through these established community resources, bilingual individuals within the communities will be identified and trained to extend language-specific pesticide safety information and education to farmers and farm families. The collaborators in this project will provide expertise, assist in developing materials and train community contacts. An ultimate goal of this innovative outreach design is to facilitate new links between community leaders and educational and regulatory agencies, providing a means for these communities to have ongoing access to important information and assistance as they eventually establish their own ongoing, community-based training programs.

The advantages of collaboration between California and Hawaii are many, and these will improve the opportunities for success. Major advantages will be the ability to pool resources, broaden the expertise and involve more communities in these efforts. The collaboration will enable educators, regulators, and the farming communities to work more closely to identify and bridge barriers. And already, discussions in preparation for this outreach have opened a number of new avenues for partnership among UC farm advisors, regulatory agencies in California and Hawaii, and others.

Brennan, O'Connor-Marer, Jolly and Schenker have submitted a grant proposal to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to partially fund this outreach.

Diane Clarke is a writer for the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Project.

The Center was able to fund three projects: Detoxifying Pesticide Protective Clothing for Farmworkers (Gang Sun of the UC Davis College of Agriculture's Division of Textiles and Clothing); Monitoring Fieldworker Infections by Sampling at Their Residence (Dean O. Cliver of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine); and Assessment of Agriculture Injuries and Illnesses in the Gila River Community (Eric Faisst, Director of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona).

Detoxifying Pesticide Protective Clothing for Farmworkers
Because past studies have shown that 97 percent of pesticides entering the body pass through the skin, workers exposed to high levels of pesticides must wear clothing made of synthetic materials that block out the pesticides. But because those materials don't "breathe," they are uncomfortable to wear while doing vigorous agricultural work. And once contaminated they must be disposed of, which is costly and poses a secondary environmental problem. As an alternative, Gang Sun, principal investigator for the project, has experimented with treating cotton/polyester fabric with a chemical called hydantoin, which breaks down agricultural pesticides known as carbamates into small, harmless fragments. The garment can then be washed with chlorine bleach, which reactivates the hydantoin for further protective use.

Laboratory tests showed that the treated fabrics took less than five minutes to degrade some carbamate pesticides by as much as 99 percent. The technique has not yet been tested on organophosphates, which include many agricultural pesticides now being used.

The objectives of Sun's current research are: to develop a technology that can convert regular clothing into nontoxic, comfortable clothing that will detoxify common pesticides; and to explore detox-ification mechanisms of halamine structures on fabric surfaces.

Monitoring Fieldworker Infections by Sampling at Their Residence
The 1997 federal Food Safety Initiative addresses manure management because of the potential health risk manure-based fertilizers pose for consumers. Agricultural workers are potentially at greater risk than consumers because of their greater exposure to manure. The major health risks from manure are intestinal infections with Salmonella spp.,E coli 0157; H7, and Cryptosporidium parvum. Infected persons shed these agents in their feces, which poses sampling and monitoring problems. Principal Investigator Dean Cliver proposes an innovative sampling plan at a newly constructed worker housing facility to evaluate a nonintrusive method of monitoring worker exposures and infections.

Sampling swabs suspended in drain lines will yield samples of wastewater from showers and laundry (indicating agents to which the workers have been exposed) and from toilets (indicating with which agents the workers have been infected) for testing.

This study is intended to monitor infections rather than illness. If the risks found are perceived as significant, Cliver and other investigators plan to look further at the manure itself in a later study, with a view to quantifying the risk as a function of the way in which manure has been handled and applied.

Assessment of Agriculture Injuries and Illness in the Gila River Indian Community
Agriculture plays a prominent economic role within the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) in Sacaton, Ariz. Community leaders are concerned about the occupational injuries and illnesses resulting from exposure to physical, chemical and biological agents existing in the work environment. Occupational injury and illness data for Native Americans are scarce to non-existent, which augments the problem of obtaining reliable information for the development and maintenance of an effective health and safety program. Through the administration of questionnaires, site-hazard assessments and record review activities, Eric Faisst will assess and characterize agricultural activities. He will also develop a database to establish a means to track these data. The results of the assessment will provide a greater understanding of occupationally related agricultural injuries and illnesses within the GRIC. These results will also play a critical role in the development of a reservation-wide occupational safety, and health education and training program. It will acquaint employers, supervisors, employees and employee representatives with the most modern and effective techniques for accident prevention and occupational health control.

"We were very pleased with the quantity and caliber of the proposals we received, and we were very sorry we couldn't fund more of them," said Stephen McCurdy, the Center's research coordinator. "Applicants forwarded many interesting and innovative ideas for promoting agricultural health and safety, and we hope to develop new collaborations with those individuals we were unable to fund."

For more information on these and other projects, please call the Center at (530) 752-4050; e-mail: agcenter@ucdavis.edu; or visit the Center's Web site at http://agcenter.ucdavis.edu/agcenter/.

• I grew up on a dairy. Should our dairy-farm family be drinking raw milk from the bulk tank?
• When they are old enough, our kids usually start helping with farm chores by feeding and caring for the dairy calves. Is this a good idea?
• We like to educate the public by having school children visit our dairy. Should we continue to do this?

The important point of each of these questions has to do with risk management. We know that almost everything has some risk involved. When we decide to take vacations traveling on California highways we know there is some risk of being involved in an automobile accident. But we go anyway because we think the risk is very small in relationship to the joy of the vacation. If the vacation is during the winter months when the fog can be very thick, we may decide the risk is too high and postpone the trip until a clearer day. In both of these situations, we are managing risk.

This same approach to managing risk can be applied to E coli,Cryptosporidium parvum and Salmonella spp. on the dairy farm. While everything is not completely known about these diseases, we can still attempt to manage the risk of a family member getting sick from one of these diseases based on what we know today.

A very important fact is that children, elderly persons and persons whose immune systems are not functioning properly are at higher risk than the general population. Since they are at higher risk, we need to be more concerned about their exposure.

We also know something about the prevalence of these potential diseases in livestock on the dairy. Although it does not cause clinical disease in cattle,E. coli prevalence in terms of fecal shedding varies with the age of the cattle. On dairies, the highest prevalence of fecal shedding (about5 percent) occurs about one month after the calves are weaned from milk and the group is penned. After this time, the occurrence of fecal shedding decreases to less than 1 percent of the animals.

Cryptosporidium parvum does cause diarrhea in young dairy calves. The time of highest risks of exposure to Cryptosporidium parvum for humans is when the calves are between 1 and 3 weeks of age. During this time, a very high percentage of calves are shedding a tremendous number of crypto-sporidia in their feces. After this time, shedding almost never occurs.

Disease from Salmonella spp. is most common in calves under 1 month of age. With both Cryptosporidium parvum and Salmonella spp., calves with diarrhea present a higher risk than calves that are normal and appear healthy. However, risk is involved in handling both calves with diarrhea as well as calves that appear to be normal.

What about the risk of drinking raw milk on the dairy? It has been reported that E coli and Salmonella spp. can be present in raw milk. However, shedding into the milk does not occur very frequently. It is also known that pasteurization of milk kills both of these organisms and many other potential human pathogens. Risk management would suggest that drinking pasteurized milk has zero risk compared to a higher, but small risk when consuming raw milk. Science would argue that raw milk should never be consumed. So how much concern should we have about visitors coming to our dairies? It depends how close their contact is with the dairy animals, which dairy animals they contact, what they consume on the dairy and what precautions are taken to prevent fecal-oral transmission. The risk of any visitor contracting a disease while on the farm is minimal if he or she avoids touching animals and avoids animal housing areas. The risk of contracting disease would be increased if visitors are permitted to enter the calf-raising areas and handle the young dairy calves.

The risk of diseases can be reduced if protective clothing is worn in these areas and if hands are washed before eating the next meal or snack.

And what about the farm families themselves? Should they behave any differently than the farm visitor? Health risks for the farm family are similar to those of visitors with the possible exception that farm family members may have received multiple, small exposures resulting in development of some immunity to these organisms. They may also have developed immunity as the result of undiagnosed bouts of disease. At this time, the occurrence of these diseases in farm families is undetermined.

Some recent history may help to provide some perspective. On a small family dairy in the eastern United States, salmonellosis was diagnosed in cows. Before the episode was over, several family members became sick with salmonellosis and some required hospitalization. More locally, cases of E coli have been reported in farm children. At least one child still requires kidney dialysis. These occurrences should be balanced against water-borne outbreaks and outbreaks of E coli in child care centers and elderly care facilities, as well as person-to-person transmission within families.

In summary, drinking raw milk has an associated unacceptable risk. This risk can be avoided by drinking pasteurized milk either from commercial sources or from on-farm pasteurization. With the reality of litigation, the risk of allowing visitors, such as school groups, to come in close contact with young dairy animals on the farm is probably prohibitive. The risk can be reduced by an on-farm educational demonstration of hand washing. Participation of farm children in daily chores involves some risk that each dairy family must manage as they see appropriate. Their choices should be based on the science as we know it today and not totally on their previous childhood experiences.

In reality, the dairy environment is probably no more risky than the day care center or community swimming pool, which are associated with higher risks of contracting disease.

All of these questions are very relevant and important for today's farm family. The answers will be different for different dairy families. All the facts are not currently known to make clear-cut decisions. However, knowing what information is available can lead to informed decisions to minimize the risk of diseases being contracted from animals on the dairy.

John H. Kirk, DVM, MPVM, is an extension veterinarian with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, and is located at the Veterinary Medicine Teaching and Research Center (VMTRC) in Tulare.

Nationwide, local offices of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division took the opportunity during the week to reach out to schools, parents, employers and young people to build partnerships and raise awareness of child labor protections that keep teens safe.

In California, efforts to raise awareness of child labor and safety laws were strong.Five California cities, including Sacramento, Oakland and San Diego, and several counties issued local proclamations in support of the "Safe Work/Safe Kids" week. In Oakland, Vice Mayor Henry Chang signed the city's proclamation at a ceremony opening a citywide summer youth employment fair. California, as well as Arizona, Hawaii and Nevada, issued state proclamations in support of the effort.

Staff members from the Wage and Hour Division visited employers and workers in California's strawberry fields and in Arizona's onion fields. During the visits, staff members provided employers and workers with pamphlets and posters from the department's "Work Safe This Summer" and "Fair Harvest/Safe Harvest" programs.

To help get the message out to the general public, Department of Labor staff members contacted the news media, delivering press kits to newspapers and public service announcements in English, Spanish and Vietnamese to more than 50 radio stations throughout the region in the weeks leading up to "Safe Work/Safe Kids" week. The announcements included scenarios in which teens are exposed to potential child labor violations, and informed teens and employers where to get information on safe work experiences from their local Wage and Hour offices. Several local television stations ran stories on "Safe Work/Safe Kids" week and the child labor laws. English and Spanish language newspapers also ran articles as a result of the contacts. The overall goal for these efforts is fewer injuries and deaths and more safe work experiences for working teens this summer.

For more information about "Safe Work/Safe Kids," the child labor laws, or any other provision enforced by the Wage and Hour Division, contact the closest Wage and Hour Office listed in the blue pages of your telephone directory or visit our Web site at http://www.dol.gov.

Sharon Brunson is regional child labor coordinator, Western Region U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.

Early on CIRS collaborated with rural communities on pesticide issues, creating slide shows and training materials, and bringing pesticide issues to the forefront in California. And in the late 1980s, Villarejo embarked upon the Farm Labor and Rural Poverty project bringing CIRS to the fields, directly talking with workers. Up to that point, much of the work had been based on primary records found in public record sources or in secondary sources.

"Most of what I know about farm labor in this state I learned because of the access to communities that Luis Magaña provided," said Villarejo. Magaña was hired on the recommendation of the advisory committee to the Farm Labor and Rural Poverty Project, and served as a liaison between rural communities and CIRS keeping both sides apprised of the issues and work being done toward resolutions. "He excelled at providing assistance to individuals. He was a social worker, a caseworker as well as a leader."

"Something over $5,000 came in from all over Northern California," said Villarejo. "These funds were brought personally by Magaña to the families in Michoacan, Mexico, and there was a feeling created that there are people in the North, in the United States, in California who really cared about what happened in this accident."

A new relationship with the UC Agricultural Health & Safety Center in 1991 broadened the scope of CIRS. Villarejo found himself collaborating with the state labor commissioner, investigators from the U.S. Department of Labor and Cal OSHA. He provided officials with information they needed to do a better job of enforcement and, in turn, CIRS collected data about enforcement activities helping Villarejo to understand how enforcement related to improving the health and safety of agricultural workers.

"As one of the UC Agricultural Health & Safety Center's original investigators, Don has made a major contribution to agricultural health and safety among farmworkers in California by combining knowledge of the community, scientific principles and a compassion and commitment to his work," says Center Director Marc Schenker. "Don is equally at home in the legislature, a scientific meeting or a migrant farmworker camp. It has been a great pleasure and honor to work with him, and I am certain that his efforts will continue to have an impact on the Center and in the state."

Villarejo will most certainly be missed by his staff members and by all who have had the pleasure to meet and interact with him. In retirement, Villarejo says he will spend a lot of time with his grandson, Zachery. He also plans to travel, garden and take dance lessons with his wife, Merna, a professor of microbiology at UC Davis, who also retired in June.

After an extensive nationwide search, CIRS selected David Lighthall, Ph.D., as the new executive director of the California Institute of Rural Studies (to be introduced in the next issue of News).

Information for this article was excerpted from an article that appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of Rural California Report, a newsletter of the California Institute for Rural Studies.

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