Study: How Pesticides Harm Young Brains
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Maria (she asked that her last name not be used) has been a farmworker in the valley for twenty-three years, since her parents moved the family from central Mexico in search of jobs. Her husband is also a farmworker. Now 38, Maria has worked in the fields picking produce, among other jobs. Even when she’s not working, she’s never far from the fields. They edge the roads she drives. There’s a vineyard a stone’s throw from her front door. Maria always knew she was in contact with pesticides; sometimes the smell burned her nose or left her with a headache. But she didn’t pay it much mind. Many farmworkers figure that poco veneno no mata—a little poison won’t kill you.
Then she started having children.
Baby Carla was prone to bouts where her chest got tight and she’d wheeze and gasp for air. The doctor diagnosed asthma. Carla’s attacks got so bad that some months she missed as many as twenty days of school, Maria told me through an interpreter.
Juan Carlos, born two years after Carla, developed asthma too, though his attacks were never as severe. Maria had other worries about him. He was a wriggly baby and then a mischievous toddler who couldn’t sit still. When Maria brought him toys, he’d destroy them in minutes. When she tried to put him in childcare, the center called her later that day and asked her to pick him up: Juan Carlos didn’t like to play with the other children. Sometimes when Maria spoke with him, he didn’t seem to understand; it seemed to her as if “he was on a different planet… as if he wasn’t present.” When he was 3, a doctor diagnosed Juan Carlos as having Asperger’s syndrome and “hyperactivity.”
The health problems affecting two of her three children—a son born in early 2013 seems healthy so far—are a mystery to Maria. There’s no history of asthma, Asperger’s or attention-deficit disorder in either parent’s family. Maria is nagged by a disturbing thought: “I sometimes worry about them getting different diseases caused by the chemicals we bring from the fields, and that we were not even aware that we were the ones exposing them.”
A growing body of research suggests that her fears are reasonable.
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http://www.thenation.com/article/178804/warning-signs-how-pesticides-harm-young-brain
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