Industrial and Agricultural Chemicals

Abstract

The alert practitioner should know the types of pollution created by agriculture and industry in his area. In agriculture, two important pollutants are nitrates and pesticides (which include insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, and defoliants). Pediatricians are well aware of methemoglobmnemia due to excessive nitrates in water. Nitrates in water supplies are of increasing concern because of runoff from feed lots and incremental use of fertilizers. Tolerance levels of nitrate in municipal water supplies are established, and pediatricians should insist that these standards be enforced in their community. With regard to pesticides, the Environmental Protection Agency has funded 13 community studies throughout the United States. The purpose is to monitor the health of pesticide workers compared with suitable controls. To date no significant health effects have been demonstrated. Most studies have been made on adult males because of their occupational exposure to pesticides. The groups under surveillance include workers who manufacture pesticides, pest-control operators who spray daily, and farmers who have intermittent exposure to high concentrations of pesticides. We are seeking the effects, if any, in the most heavily exposed persons before trying to determine the effects of smaller doses. This approach suffers the problem of small sample size (several thousand instead of hundreds of thousands of exposed persons). Our studies and those of others have shown that DDT in the sera of blacks is about two to three times that of whites.1-3 We had assumed that this difference was due to environmental exposure, but recent studies in Charleston, South Carolina, have suggested a genetic factor.