#pesticide-exposure

#pesticide-exposure

Hundreds of thousands of times each year in California, farmers and their contractors spray pesticides on fields and orchards in the state's agricultural heartlands. Farmworkers young and old can be exposed to dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals if they are not properly trained, left uninformed about when they can safely enter sprayed fields or exposed to pesticide applications - because of factors such as wind drift or operator error.

A new study published in the journal Cancers has uncovered a disturbing link between pesticide exposure during pregnancy and a dramatically increased risk of death in children diagnosed with leukemia. The federally funded study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), examined 837 children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer. The results were alarming: children exposed to pesticides during pregnancy had a 60% higher risk of death, while those exposed to rodenticides faced a staggering 91% increased risk of death.