Poison Spring Read Free

with crawling insects, mosquitoes, and flies. There was one toilet for every eight workers, and only two-thirds of them were indoors. More than half the labor camps were located within fifty yards of crops sprayed with parathion, guthion, lanate, and sevin.
    Owens also knew that most of the migrant farmworkers were hungry most of the time. He found their diet was “grossly inadequate,” since the food they ate “approached the critical level of 50 percent of the recommended minimum daily caloric intake level.”
    A man with the teeth of hunger in his belly at the same time he is harvesting crops sprayed with toxins is playing with fire, perhaps even death. The key human enzyme affected by exposure to nerve poisons is known as acetylcholinesterase. Neurotoxic pesticides inhibit the production of this neurotransmitter—and the levels of acetylcholinesterase in the man were taking dangerous dives, Owens noticed, especially when the worker was not eating well. Some 80 percent of the workers developed severe skin rashes; two dozen required medical attention. A worker caught tuberculosis. A child died. A man died. At the Pennsylvania farm where the man died, a helicopter had applied three gallons of the nerve toxins parathion and guthion per acre, 12 times the recommended rate.
    The early warning signs of acute or chronic pesticide poisoning are no more distinctive than a headache or dizziness. Unless farmworkers are “down and out,” they are not likely to pay attention to a headache or a “wheezy stomach.” Poor working people don’t stop working “unless they are taken out of a field desperately ill.”
    The implication of this finding alone is frightening. Pesticides cripple and kill. They are also responsible for subtle and not so subtle changes in human behavior. A migrant farmworker at the end of a harvest season is not the same person he was when he started his migration. He has been subjected to a variety of “body insults” such as spray poisoning, a bad diet, and very bad living conditions.
    Fifty-six percent of the farmworkers had “abnormal kidney and liver functions: 78 percent had severe chronic skin rash; and 54 percent abnormalities in chest cavities,” Owens reported. “Migrant workers are young workers, i.e., mean age of 25 years, but their health statistics resemble those of middle-aged Americans.” 5
    Owens’s research has broad implications. Hundreds of thousands of American- and foreign-born laborers suffer the rigors of working on pesticide-laden farms. The Owens brothers must have known their findings would be considered adversarial by the very government that was funding them. Indeed, they spent considerable time between 1974 and 1982 begging the EPA and the National Science Foundation for further research support. But the National Science Foundation dropped the Owenses in 1977, and the next year, the EPA granted them less than $10,000. That would be their last check from the EPA. 6
    The EPA was apparently uninterested in the Owenses’ concern that farm sprays caused debilitating sickness to the migrants laboring in the midst of poison-drenched vegetables and other crops. A senior EPA scientist and manager told the Owens brothers that more EPA money might become available as long as they offered “no attempt to draw ‘cause-effect’ correlations” between pesticides and health effects.
    “I then told the ‘Bros.’ that once EPA had this report, we would seriously review . . . any proposal they put together for the support of further analytical work (not that we would fund it, but that we would consider it),” the EPA official wrote. 7
    Yet the Owenses’ study, “The Extent of Exposure of Migrant Workers to Pesticides and Pesticide Residues,” submitted both under the Carter administration in May 1978 and under the Reagan administration in May 1982, clearly showed the connection between toxic sprays and sickness among farmhands.
     
    There were other reasons why the EPA dismissed