Health Symptoms Related to Pesticide Use in Farmers and Laborers of Ecological and Conventional Banana Plantations in Ecuador

Abstract

Conventional banana farming is pesticide-intensive and leads to high exposure of farmworkers. Ecuador is the world’s biggest exporter of bananas. In this field study in 5 communities in Ecuador, we recorded potentially pesticide-associated subjective health symptoms in farmworkers and compared pesticide users to workers in organic farming. With one exception, symptom rates were always higher in the pesticide-exposed group. Significance was reached in 8 out of 19 investigated symptoms with the highest odds ratios (and smallest p-values) for local irritation like skin and eye irritation (OR = 3.58, CI 1.10–11.71, and 4.10, CI 1.37–12.31, respectively) as well as systemic symptoms like dizziness (OR = 4.80, CI 1.55–14.87) and fatigue (OR = 4.96, CI 1.65–14.88). Moreover, gastrointestinal symptoms were reported more frequently by pesticide users: nausea (OR = 7.5, CI 1.77–31.77) and diarrhea (OR = 6.43, CI 1.06–30.00). The majority of farmworkers were not adequately protected from pesticide exposure. For example, only 3 of 31 farmworkers that had used pesticides recently reported using gloves and only 6 reported using masks during active spraying. Improved safety measures and a reduction in pesticide use are necessary to protect the health of banana farmworkers.

Psychological and Physical Health of Organic and Conventional Farmers: A Review

“…Physical health was evaluated with the SF-36, the EQ-D5, and the VAS by Cross et al (2008) [28]. 2006) focused on diverse physical symptoms (e.g., skin rash, wheezing) [18,30,38]. Neurological symptoms, including sensory and motor symptoms, were measured by Khan et al (2018) [17].…”

“…Other indicators, such as body mass index (BMI), thyroids hormones, cholesterol, are globally lower among organic farmers compared to conventional farmers [34][35][36][37]. Within sixty-nine symptoms tested in five studies, ten were more frequent among organic farmers (e.g., chest pain, frequent urination), and nineteen were less present (e.g., sensory symptoms, wheezing with shortness of breath) [17,18,29,30,38]. In addition, agroecological farmers consumed more dairy and "other fruit" than reference farmers, without any difference for the other food categories [39].…”

“…AS general physical health measures did not differ between farmers, the results of these studies presented some differences for symptoms, pain, nutrition, or physiological indicators. These effects were in favor of organic farmers in ten studies [17,18,29,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Two studies presented effects in favor of each type of farmers, depending on symptoms [30,33].…”

Pesticides Uses, Impacts on Environment and their Possible Remediation Strategies- A Review

“…Exposure to these contaminated goods takes pace when these are in contact with human body in the environment (Lorenz, 2009). People are put in trouble during management and utilization of pesticides, as these produce toxicity during cleaning, keeping apparatus, pollution of water, clothing and food (Hutter, 2021).…”

“…A variety of compounds are present in pesticides which are used for different agricultural practices including, herbicides, nematicides, molluscidies, rodenticides, insecticides, fungicides and various plant growth regulators. Pesticides have a wide range of uses, sources and toxic nature depending upon the purpose of use and synthesis (Bashir et al, 2018) and due to these reasons; pesticides have high global concerns (Damalas and Eleftherohorinos, 2011) because harvesters and neighborhood of the cultivated areas are exposed directly or indirectly to the pesticides during treatment, cleaning and storage of agriculture products (Hutter et al, 2021). Even a good pesticide is not only harmful for the plants and animals in the ecosystem but also causes the damage to the targeted specimen organisms for which being used (Arias-Estevez et al, 2008).…”