The Pesticide Exposed Workers Study
Chief Investigators
Funding
Cancer Council Victoria (cohort assembly and inaugural registry linkages)
Estimated completion date
This is an ongoing project with update linkages to cancer and death registries at periodic intervals (eg. five- to ten-year intervals, funding dependent).
Summary
This explores a large cohort of some 13,000 workers who were end-users of pesticides and participated in pesticide biomonitoring programs from the 1960s to the 1990s. Predominantly agricultural workers, this cohort also includes smaller groups of municipal and public utilities workers, and dedicated pest controllers.
Linkage to the national cancer and death registries is used in this project to estimate rates of cancers and causes of death in the cohort compared with that of the general population, identifying trends associated with exposure. The cohort will be re-linked to the registries at periodic intervals (eg. five to ten years).
Because this cohort includes several subgroups, it has been possible to analyse certain groups within the cohort separately, such as the dedicated pest control operators, a group with a distinctive exposure profile.
This project supplies data to international projects coordinated by AGRICOH: Consortium for Agricultural Cohort Studies, managed by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, generating numerous publications.
Projected impact
This cohort study helps understand the long-term health effects of end-user exposure to a range of pesticide products among a variety of occupational pesticide users. This in turn may help identify unanticipated long-term health effects, facilitate intervention among occupational pesticide users, and help health services plan for the needs of this workforce.
Key findings to date
Analyses to date have tended to indicate rates of overall cancer and all-cause mortality similar to the general population, however, elevations in certain categories of injury-related deaths have been evident, namely unintentional poisonings and deaths by self-harm. However, these do not appear to be associated with use of particular pesticide types nor with documented past over-exposures. The comparatively small numbers of deaths in these categories to date means that future rounds of registry linkage will be important to better understand these preliminary findings.
Key outputs
MacFarlane E, Benke G, Del Monaco A, Sim M. Causes of death and incidence of cancer in a cohort of Australian pesticide-exposed workers. Ann Epidemiol. 2010 Apr;20(4):273-80. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2010.01.004.
MacFarlane E, Simpson P, Benke G, Sim M. Suicide in Australian pesticide-exposed workers. Occup Med (Lond). 2011 Jun;61(4):259-64. doi: 10.1093/occmed/kqr031.
MacFarlane E, Benke G, Del Monaco A, Sim M. Cancer incidence and mortality in a historical cohort of Australian pest control workers. Occup Environ Med. 2009 Dec;66(12):818-23. doi: 10.1136/oem.2008.045427.