Warning Signs

When busy traffic at an intersection poses an obvious hazard, a stop sign or a traffic signal is installed. Prudent cities do not wait until the number of accidents, injuries and deaths has reached an intolerable level to act. The same logic should be at work when it comes to posting California farmlands that have been treated with pesticides that pose a potential danger to farm workers.

Under current law and regulation, the state Department of Food and Agriculture generally requires the posting of warning signs around fields where the residue from pesticides poses a long-term hazard. But such warning signs are required for only 13 crops where the danger period is less than eight days. This is so even though field work on some crops--citrus, for instance--involves considerable contact between the skin and the foliage that has been sprayed.

The department decides which crops must be posted on the basis of prior incidents of poisoning, using a ratio of illnesses and the total number of acres of that specific crop that are grown. Thus, if the record indicates that there have been relatively few accidents in proportion to the number of acres grown, that crop need not be posted.

State Sen. Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland) argues that this sort of “victim-counting” criterion ignores the basic tenet of health protection. He again has successfully sponsored legislation, SB 1756, that would require the department to base posting decisions on the potential danger, not the record of actual reported incidents. He makes a strong argument, for instance, that the data are flawed because many poisonings go unreported.

The bill has passed both houses of the Legislature and is before Gov. George Deukmejian for his signature. Deukmejian vetoed a similar bill a year ago, and his Administration has opposed the Petris bill again.

In response to a query from Petris about the exemption of citrus fields, Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill said that health and safety risks must be balanced against costs. As an analogy, Berryhill noted that Medi-Cal reimbursements are limited because of the cost of health programs and not because treatment is not desired or needed by the patient. The analogy would be relevant only to the extent that a doctor gave the ill person the treatment that he or she deserved, but with a warning that Medi-Cal might not pay all the cost.

Farm workers who are sent to work in many fields laden with potentially dangerous pesticides now get no warning. And that is precisely why the Petris bill should be signed into law.