Workers face debilitating exposure to countless pesticides on the job

By DON McINTOSH, Staff Reporter

In 1996 in Oregon's Marion County, a truck driver loading compost near a greenhouse was exposed to pesticides: N-methyl carbamate and the organophosphate Diazinon.

That same year 12 Oregon health care workers were exposed when treating a patient who tried to commit suicide by ingesting another organophosphate pesticide - less than a teaspoon is normally enough to kill an adult. After exposure to the patient's skin, breath, vomit and other bodily fluids, the workers suffered headache, nausea, and dizziness. They may have had blurred vision and tremors as well.

In Umatilla County, 18 farm workers were working a field when a helicopter sprayed the fungicide chlorothalonil directly on them.

In Multnomah County, six fire fighters responding to an alarm entered a house that appeared to be full of smoke. They entered the house without respirators. The "smoke" proved to be pyrethrin, a pest-killing fogger.

As many as 9,000 pesticides are currently in use in the United States. They range from the highly-toxic organophosphates encountered by the truck driver and the health care workers to the pyrethrin that the fire fighters inhaled - an extract of the chrysanthemum plant. In 1999, the Oregon Legislature passed a law that's supposed to shed some light on what pesticides are being applied, but it won't begin to take effect until 2002.

Right now, environmentalists, public health advocates and representatives of organized labor are negotiating with representatives of chemical and agricultural interests over how strict the reporting requirements will be. But leaders of Oregon's Treeplanters and Farm Workers Union (PCUN) say the game is already over - the law, written by business interests and passed by a Republican-led Legislature, will be of no help to farm workers, who suffer from pesticide exposure more than any other occupational group.

Brad Witt, secretary-treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO, would like to see more involvement from organized labor on the pesticide issue. Witt and Nancy Padilla, president of the Oregon Public Employees Union, are the only labor voices on the state's Pesticide Advisory Group, the labor-environmentalist-industry body that will make recommendations on how to develop the Pesticide Use Reporting Program.

Pesticide exposure is an occupational risk for many union workers; about half the reported incidents of exposure documented by a multi-agency task force known as the Pesticide Analytical Response Center (PARC) were in the workplace. Between 1993 and 1996, pesticide exposure incidents were reported in Oregon among road crew workers, landscapers, janitors, construction workers, teachers, office workers, retail clerks, restaurant workers, warehouse workers and workers in grain storage and forestry. The acute exposures PARC tallies typically produce burning or irritation of eyes and skin. But it's the long-term, chronic exposures that most concern Neva Hassanein, head of the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides. Twelve of the 26 most widely-used pesticides in the United States are classified as carcinogens by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. And chronic exposure to many pesticides can also damage the nervous system, disrupt the hormone and immune systems, and lead to sperm abnormalities, birth defects, and miscarriages.

Laws already on the books are supposed to protect workers against pesticide exposure. But few are being enforced.

Efrain Pena, a union organizer with PCUN, worked as a pesticide applicator for four years. In that time he saw only one state inspector. The agent asked Pena and his co-workers if they had masks and other protective equipment.

"We lied to him, because we were afraid we would be fired if we told the truth," Pena recalled. The truth was that the workers had never been issued protective equipment. The inspector didn't ask to see any.

Symptoms from exposure to pesticides were commonplace in Pena's experience, including immediate nausea and dizziness. "Sometimes, workers would get really sick, and the growers would tell them, 'If you feel bad, don't work.' " Pena tells of one worker who complained of severe stomach and headaches and went home to Mexico to be treated. When the worker returned a month later, he was not hired back, though he had worked for that grower for 11 years.

Once a year, he said, the applicator crew would be "trained" for safety, meaning that the overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking workers would be shown a video, in English, that showed workers using protective gear to handle pesticides. Then Pena and the others would be asked to sign a form affirming that they'd been trained.

Pena has no idea what chemicals he was exposed to. The law requires that growers post that information, but he says he never saw it, and that he and the other workers were afraid to ask.

Right now, exposure to pesticides is greatly under-reported. Workers are afraid to report it. Doctors, seeing vomiting and nausea as flu-like symptoms, don't know to report it. And employers may be reluctant to report it for fear of liability.

PCUN had hoped the new pesticide reporting law would help in its campaign for better enforcement. But on the way to passage,the law was fatally compromised.

Hassanein describes the compromise. In 1999 her group and others in the coalition Oregon Pesticide Education Network (OPEN) sponsored bills in the Oregon House and Senate that would have mandated extensive pesticide reporting requirements. In the event of defeat in the Republican-dominated Legislature, the coalition was also preparing to wage a ballot measure campaign. Hassanein thinks agricultural and chemical interests conducted a poll and found high public support for such an initiative. Afraid they would lose at the polls, business interests pushed a much weaker version of the law and won approval from lawmakers and the governor. OPEN's bill, proposed by Representative Vicki Walker, was "gutted and stuffed with compromise language," Hassanein said.

"The act was set up in the interests of manufacturers and applicators," says Witt. As a result, the information won't be specific enough to help farm workers, says Erik Nicholson, collective bargaining committee coordinator for PCUN. Nicholson said the law doesn't require that users identify the exact location where pesticides are used; it doesn't reveal the names of the pesticide applicators; it prohibits civil lawsuits against users of pesticides; it won't say what crop the chemicals were used on; and with the reports to be filed annually, the information won't be immediate enough. Furthermore, Nicholson said he has no faith the requirement to report will even be enforced. Under the law, the reporting will be essentially voluntary until 2006.

"After all is said and done with this bill, our members still won't know what they're being exposed to," Nicholson said.

The law will provide some benefit to environmentalists and public health advocates, though, Hassanein thinks. Once the data starts rolling in, in 2002, it will be used to identify populations at risk, target educational efforts, and determine which water bodies are vulnerable to pollution and what chemical residues government agencies should monitor.

"This information is necessary to do research to document how pesticides affect human health in the real world," Hassanein said. "Right now it's a guessing game." Hassanein also thinks once Oregonians have accurate data on how much pesticides are being used, they will be more concerned and demand further action.

How detailed the information will be is, for now, the subject of heated debate on the Pesticide Advisory Group, the 18-member work group that will recommend specifics of the program to the Department of Agriculture. The group includes public health advocates, Hassanein and several other environmentalists, Padilla and Witt from organized labor, and nine members from the agricultural and pesticide industries. PCUN has refused to take part.

When it began in January, the group opted for a "consensus" process, reasoning that if such divergent interests can agree, their united recommendation will have more weight than if it is contradicted by minority reports. But that doesn't mean the group's twice-monthly meetings are a lovefest. The April 5 meeting turned into a shouting match.

At a minimum, the product, amount, purpose, location, and month of pesticide applications will have to be reported. But the specifics vary widely: Will users have to provide street address or just the zip code, for example?

"I see these people trying to avoid any kind of public information because they're scared to death of the liability," Witt said. "They're trying to manage the process of reporting so that public opinion doesn't bring about what they consider unreasonable reporting requirements."