People Living Close to Sprayed Fields Have a Higher Exposure to Pesticides
Many people in Saskatchewan live close to pesticide-sprayed fields. Farms, town edges, school yards, many cottage subdivisions, and most of our cities are surrounded by fields.
People living closer to sprayed fields are exposed to more pesticide drift. Health effects of pesticide drift.
"Pesticide drift is any airborne movement of pesticides away from the intended target site, including droplets, dusts, volatilized vapor-phase pesticides,
and pesticide-contaminated soil particles. Drift can occur both during and for many days, weeks, and even months after pesticide application. It can be very
noticeable as a cloud of pesticide spray or dust or an unpleasant odor during the application. It can also be insidious—invisible to the eye, undetectable to
the nose, but still capable of causing illness. As with secondhand cigarette smoke, these secondhand pesticides can cause significant adverse health impacts
even at low levels. Drift is forced on others against their will and often without their knowledge." (1)
"New analysis of pesticide drift in this report reveals
that several widely used pesticides are regularly
found far from their application sites at concentrations
that signifi cantly exceed acute and chronic exposure
levels deemed “safe” by regulatory agencies.
Virtually everywhere pesticides are used, they drift
away from their intended target and
can persist for days and even months
after application." (1) The pesticides studied in the report include chlorpyrifos (Lorsban) and diazinon.
"U.S. EPA is required to assess all routes of pesticide
exposure (food, water, air, and other) when it reevaluates
a pesticide. However, it routinely dismisses
secondhand exposures from post-application drift
as unimportant for non-fumigant pesticides, even
though it has not yet evaluated California’s extensive
set of air monitoring data that demonstrates the
scope of the problem. Even for the highly volatile
fumigants, risks from vapor drift have only been
evaluated for a single pesticide, Telone." (1. Secondhand Pesticides:Airborne Pesticide Drift in California Under General) The same is true of the Canadian PMRA. Pest Management Registration Agency. recheck link: http://www.panna.org/files/SecondhandPs.pdf
Home exposure to agricultural weed killers through contaminated dust increases as the acreage of nearby croplands increases.
Traveingl on roads when the surrounding fields have been recently sprayed with pesticides also exposes us to pesticides. The day I took this photo near Buffalo Pound Provincial Park, I was made very sick by the widespread use of dessicant on legume crops. Fully 1/4 fo the distance from Regina to the park, 15 linear miles, often on both sides of the highways, had been dessicated, assumedly with diquat, which is the herbicide recommended for this. When on a rise of land, it was obvious that several hundred square miles of legumes had all been sprayed in the previous few days.
within 500 meters of sprayed fields are more exposed to pesticides.
Ass link to ND study on lower IQ ( spr 2006) and otehr recent ones. Crosslink to helatah pages.