VivirLatino

If you aren’t sure what a pesticide drift is, you should really read this article at Orion. It not only covers what pesticide drifts are, but who they are affecting and exactly how they are affecting those people.

A clip from the article:

LUIS MEDELLIN LIVES IN LINDSAY, another poor community comprised almost entirely of immigrants, about an hour east of Huron in neighboring Tulare County. In the summer of 2006, he and eleven others from Lindsay volunteered to collect their urine every day for two weeks so that PANNA could test for the presence of chlorpyrifos in their bodies. Medellin, twenty-two, works as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He lives in a trailer park surrounded by orange trees, but figured he was young and strong and unlikely to have a toxic chemical in his bloodstream.

Yet Medellin had 7 micrograms of chlorpyrifos per liter of urine, or 4.5 times the amount of the average American adult. He fell within range, just barely, of the EPA’s acceptable level for healthy adults (7.9 micrograms/liter). One woman, a former farmworker who no longer works in the fields, had levels twice that. Only two of the study participants worked in the fields during sampling, but eleven of the twelve people tested had levels above the level that EPA data and PANNA analysis indicate would be an acceptable daily exposure for pregnant and nursing women (1.5 micrograms/liter).