Poor EnforcementReentry intervals are intended to prevent farmers and farm labor contractors from
sending harvest workers into fields for a specified number of hours after particular
pesticides have been applied in order to permit the chemicals to degrade into less
toxic substances. The field sanitation regulation requires farmers and contractors to
provide drinking water and sanitation facilities, which can be utilized in cases of acute
pesticide exposure. These safe work practices are woefully underenforced. For
instance, less than half of the seventy high-profile California pesticides have reentry
intervals of more than one day, and many have no reentry intervals at all. The protec-
tive equipment and sanitation requirements are widely ignored; a targeted enforce-
ment effort documented the manner in which even the most elementary hygienic
practices are disregarded. In California, less than 3 percent of all farms are inspected
each year by the state, and in many other states, the inspections are even more rare.
Without strong enforcement of existing standards, violations are likely to continue.
The EPA should expeditiously reevaluate the WPS in order to determine whether it
adequately protects the health of farmworkers. The EPA should, for example, con-
sider using standardized data on sizes and age-specific weights and heights for model-
ing children’s exposure when more specific information on children’s exposures to
individual pesticides may be lacking.^17The Fresno County IncidentIn California, suspected pesticide-related illnesses and suspected work-related ill-
nesses and injuries are reportable conditions. On July 31, 1998, the Occupational
Health Branch of the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) received a
report from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) of a pesticide
exposure incident in Fresno County involving thirty-four farmworkers, both adults
and minors. CDHS investigated this incident by reviewing medical records of the
thirty-four workers and interviewing twenty-nine. The workers’ ages ranged from
thirteen to sixty-four years with a median age of thirty-one years. The findings indi-
cated that the workers became ill after early reentry into a cotton field that had been
sprayed with three pesticides. The primary pesticide used was carbofuran, which,
when used on cotton, has a restricted entry interval (REI) of forty-eight hours and
requires both posting of treated fields and oral notification of workers. Neither warn-
ing was provided. After weeding for approximately four hours, the workers were
transported to a second field two and one-half miles away that had been sprayed two
days earlier with three pesticides whose REI was twelve hours. Within approximately
one-half hour of entering the second field, the workers began feeling ill and stopped
working. The symptoms most commonly reported by the thirty-four workers were:
nausea (97 percent), headache (94 percent), eye irritation (85 percent), muscle weak-
ness (82 percent), tearing (68 percent), vomiting (79 percent), and salivation (56
percent).34 | Pesticides