PANNA’s Online Tool Helps Doctors Diagnose and Report Pesticide Poisonings

It is astonishing that only thirteen U.S. states require that doctors or employers report pesticide-related illnesses. Even in California, the state with arguably the most rigorous pesticide use and pesticide-related illness reporting systems, under-reporting remains a big problem.

The reasons for under-reporting are common to workers around the world: lack of health insurance or accessible medical facilities, fear of retaliation and job loss, and totally inadequate recognition among workers and physicians of pesticide-related illnesses and how and where to report them. Even when a reporting system exists, it is often complicated and time-consuming. As a result, the true extent and severity of pesticide poisonings in agriculture remains invisible and unaddressed.

Since October 2003 PANNA has maintained an Online Pesticide Poisoning Diagnostic Tool (www.pesticideinfo.org), designed to helphealth care professionals and others recognize, diagnose and report pesticide-related illnesses. It uses a sophisticated search tool combining information on poisoning symptoms, type of pesticide used, the crop or site where it was used, the country or state (or county in Florida and California) where the poisoning occurred, and the pesticide or pesticide product most likely to be the cause of the observed poisoning. The tool includes diagnostic, treatment, and related information for 1900 pesticides, and reporting requirements, instructions, and contacts for all fifty U.S. states.

The launch of the online tool received enthusiastic support from the health care community, ranging from physicians serving farmworker communities to national organizations such as the Migrant Clinicians Network, Association of Environmental and Occupational Clinics and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Ann Turner, Co-Medical Director of Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Services, an Oregon health center serving the farmworker population for thirty years, observed, “Pesticide poisoning diagnosis can be problematic. We often see patients with symptoms we suspect are due to pesticide exposure, but we can't be sure. We are so busy as providers that having to stop and look up information about pesticides in multiple reference books is not easy to do. I have had the opportunity to be involved in the testing of this new online tool and find it to be accessible, current, user-friendly and quite comprehensive. Most importantly it provides information that can make a difference in making a critical diagnosis.”

Marcia Miller, Chief Executive Officer of the Northwest Regional Primary Care Association explained, “Our ability to advocate for better pesticide regulation is only as good as our data on pesticide poisoning, and those data are incomplete because we—including health care providers—have limited access to information on diagnosis, and an inconsistent system of tracking.”

PANNA Launches AirPIC

AirPIC—the California Air and Pesticides Information Center—is the latest database tool released by PAN North America, joining the Pesticide Poisoning Diagnostic tool, WaterPIC, and other tools serving the public's right to know about pesticide use and exposure. Now anyone can go to www.pesticideinfo.org to better understand where and when pesticides are applied in California and how they might affect an area's air quality.

Pesticide drift is a major source of toxic air pollution and has been linked to a number of environmental health problems. According to the California Pesticide Use Reporting system 174 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients were used in 2003 throughout California. [1] More than 90% of pesticides used in the state are prone to airborne drift because they are sprays, dusts, or gaseous fumigants. [2]

Public awareness of the hazards of airborne pesticides, as well as research to more fully document the links between pesticide exposure and diseases, are essential for understanding cause and effect relationships, and ultimately reducing use of toxic pesticides. The Air-PIC helps achieve this goal by providing free and easy access to scientifically reliable, quantitative, and unbiased information about pesticide use and air pollution potential.

Using the AirPIC, communities can more easily identify pesticides most likely to be air pollutants. Using this knowledge, they can raise awareness locally about pesticide hazards and press for transitions to less toxic pest control methods. The AirPIC makes it easier for regulators to determine locations and times of high pesticide use that may lead to harmful human and environmental pesticide exposures.

Scientists can use the AirPIC to quickly study different combinations of geographic area, time (within a three-year period) and pesticides, thus speeding up the search for specific chemicals that contribute to adverse health effects such as birth defects [3], Parkinson's disease [4] and cancer. [5] Anyone interested in directly sampling the air for harmful pesticides can now use the AirPIC to identify months likely to have the highest or lowest aerial concentrations of pesticides, as PAN is currently doing with its Drift Catcher program (see the spring issue of this magazine).

Whether you're catching drift or just interested in knowing what's in the air near a particular crop, you can go to the AirPIC at http://www.pesticideinfo.org/airpic, select a California county, a group of pesticides (by crop or toxicity category), and a specific pesticide. The AirPIC provides a plot of monthly pesticide use for the selected pesticide for 2001–2003.

Development of AirPIC was funded by the California Environmental Health Tracking Program and True North Foundation. Additional features will be added this summer and launched in fall 2006.

References

1. California Department of Pesticide Regulation, California Pesticide Use Reporting Data, 2003, http://www.cdpr.ca.gov/docs/pur/purmain.htm.

2. This percentage was calculated from PUR data by determining the amount of pesticides applied as formulations that are unlikely to drift off-site during applications and subtracting from the total reported amount of pesticides applied in the state. The non-drift-prone formulations include granular pesticides, gels/pastes/creams, microencapsulated products, impregnated materials, and pellet/tablet/cake/briquette/ formulations. The total amount of products applied in these formulations was 8.8 million pounds out of 187.6 million total pounds reported in 2000.

3. CA Environmental Health Tracking Program Central Valley South Coast Tracking Project.

4. Ritz B, Yu F. 2000. Parkinson's Disease Mortality and Pesticide Exposure in California 1984-1994. Int. J. Epidemiol, Vol. 29:323-329.

5. a) Reynolds, P. et. al. 2005. Residential Proximity to Agricultural Pesticide Use and Incidence of Breast Cancer in California , 1988-1997. Envi. Health Persp., 113(8): 993–1000.
b) Gunier, R. B. et. al. 2001. Agricultural Pesticide Use in California : Pesticide Prioritization, Use Densities, and Population Distributions for a Childhood Cancer Study. Envi. Health Persp. , 109: 1071–1078.
c) Reynolds, P. et.al. 2002. Childhood Cancer and Agricultural Pesticide Use: An Ecologic Study in California . Envi. Health Persp., 110: 319-324.