This paper reviews a successful community-based education effort to minimize pesticide exposure to migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families through innovative training curricula, informal participatory educational techniques and culturally sensitive outreach methods. In 2004, Migrant Clinicians Network, Inc., trained lay health educators, or promotoras de salud, from local agencies in southern New Mexico in pesticide safety and in ways to successfully promote safety information in the farmworker community. Through home visits and small group workshops, the promotoras trained 273 farmworkers and farmworker family members on ways to reduce exposures to pesticides in their homes and at work, with an emphasis on protecting children. The families received a Spanish language comic book that reinforced the pesticide safety information, emphasizing the health effects of acute and chronic pesticide exposure and steps to protect farmworker children from pesticide exposure. The project resulted in a significant increase in knowledge regarding the routes of exposure, the vulnerability of children, the signs and symptoms of pesticide poisonings and the ways to minimize pesticide exposures. Additionally, the project showed improved behaviors aimed at minimizing pesticide exposure through accidental poisonings in the home. This pilot project proved the efficacy of an in-home, one-on-one approach with a culturally appropriate educational comic book as an instrument to help transfer education to the community. Moreover, the educational method involving promotoras offers a training-of- trainer approach that is easy to implement and potentially replicate.

Due to their antibacterial and antiviral effects, silver nanoparticles (AgNP) are one of the most widely used nanomaterials worldwide in various industries, e.g., in textiles, cosmetics and biomedical-related products. Unfortunately, the lack of complete physicochemical characterization and the variety of models used to evaluate its cytotoxic/genotoxic effect make comparison and decision-making regarding their safe use difficult. In this work, we present a systematic study of the cytotoxic and genotoxic activity of the commercially available AgNPs formulation Argovit™ in Allium cepa. The evaluated concentration range, 5–100 µg/mL of metallic silver content (85–1666 µg/mL of complete formulation), is 10–17 times higher than the used for other previously reported polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-AgNP formulations and showed no cytotoxic or genotoxic damage in Allium cepa. Conversely, low concentrations (5 and 10 µg/mL) promote growth without damage to roots or bulbs. Until this work, all the formulations of PVP-AgNP evaluated in Allium cepa regardless of their size, concentration, or the exposure time had shown phytotoxicity. The biological response observed in Allium cepa exposed to Argovit™ is caused by nanoparticles and not by silver ions. The metal/coating agent ratio plays a fundamental role in this response and must be considered within the key physicochemical parameters for the design and manufacture of safer nanomaterials.

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Kumeyaay people were historically hunter-gatherers with a strong relationship with their natural resources. Due to various processes, such as missionary colonization, agrarian reform, and the definition of the border between the USA and Mexico in 1838, the Indigenous populations faced reduced mobility within their territory and modified their lifestyles, highly related to landscape and plants. One of their strong traditional practices associated with plant resources, basket-making, has likewise changed. Today, this activity is one of the most important sources of income for many of the families in the community. Nevertheless, this is being now threatened by the loss of vegetation cover, from which they obtain primary basket-making material and is now far from being environmentally and economically sustainable. An interdisciplinary group is addressing this problem from a multidisciplinary perspective and through a participatory methodological approach based on community mapping to enable the integration of local and scientific knowledge and to create vegetation management and conservation actions. Community-based Indigenous mapping has proven to be a powerful tool for the integration of traditional knowledge and its various dimensions, and knowledge integration between traditional and scientific knowledge has been successful. The project allowed for plant population analysis and adequate decision-making regarding natural resources management and conservation. The methods developed in this research represent significant progress in the development of internal capacities and empowerment of the community.

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