Post pesticide applications on the internet
Forty years ago, Monterey
Bay community members, including physicians like me, successfully pushed for the first legally required field-post pesticide application warnings in California. I believe these warning signs have prevented thousands of pesticide poisonings since 1981 in Monterey County, where the field posts started, and throughout the state, where the warnings were required two years later. At the beginning of 2021, we have far more ability to warn the public and medical professionals to keep our communities safer. We should.
I participated in the prolonged struggle to prove that farmworkers suffered serious illness from pesticide exposure and that they should be warned when and where toxic pesticides are applied.
In July of 1980, 23 farmworkers became ill while working in a Salinas cauliflower field. The field they entered had been sprayed with two potent insecticides. Most suffered moderate to severe symptoms and some had collapsed in the field.
About half the workers were dropped off in the Emergency parking lot at Natividad Medical Center, the Monterey County hospital where I was doing my second year residency. We hospitalized the patients, including two in the intensive care unit, and followed the recommended National Poison Control Center guidelines.
The other half of the workers were taken to the private hospital, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital, where they were evaluated by doctors on contract with the growers to provide care for work-related injuries. The company doctors sent all the patients home and even suggested some of them were suffering hangovers from alcohol ingestion!
In addition to treating the workers and fighting the legal battle for their case, we were able to publish five scientific papers in respected medical journals outlining the proper protocol for diagnosis and management of pesticide poisoning. Bolstering this work, the Monterey County Pesticide Coalition was formed to educate the public about the dangers of pesticides and to advocate for public safety measures.
We fought for a posting regulation requiring skull and crossbones signs be placed on fields sprayed with dangerous pesticides. The growers opposed the idea primarily because it would raise the awareness about pesticides in our food. Science prevailed, and the first posting regulation in the country was approved in Monterey County in 1981. Two years later, it was also passed at the state level.
There are still mass poisonings in the fields — far too many, but fewer than the period before warning signposts. There is a need for continuous monitoring and public education to keep rural communities safe.
One form this education should take is to upgrade the pesticide warning system, so that the public has access to pesticide application information. If counties simply posted online the Notices of Intent to apply toxic pesticides that county Agriculture Commissioners receive from growers, we would have a more effective warning system than we were able to put into place 40 years ago, long before the Internet.
Web-posting in advance the plans to apply highly hazardous pesticides would give us a heads up, allowing those in potential harm’s way to take extra precautions. Farmworkers, parents and teachers could close windows, take clothes off the line, and keep those with breathing vulnerabilities indoors to better protect against the threat of drifting pesticide harms. I believe medical professionals could better care for their patients with the ability to quickly check online about possible exposure to pesticide drift.
My hope is that the Monterey Bay will once again take leadership of toxic pesticide warnings with a 21st Century version of the 1981 Monterey County Pesticide Field-Posting ordinance, this time adding posts on the digital Web in addition to the posts in the ground.