Policy
Mishandled Data Means No One Knows if California’s New Pesticide Regulation Protects Workers
Inside Climate News · By Liza Gross ·
The Brief
- State agencies discarded air-monitoring results after seeing "abnormal patterns".
- The discarded data leaves scant information on farmworker exposure to two cancer-causing fumigants.
- Because of the gap, it is unclear whether California's new pesticide regulation protects workers.
Why it matters
Without reliable exposure measurements, regulators and researchers cannot confirm whether a new rule actually reduces health risks from cancer-causing fumigants for farmworkers.
Who’s affected
- farmworkers exposed to fumigants in California
- anyone with a stake in California pesticide policy
State agencies ditched air-monitoring results after seeing “abnormal patterns,” leaving scant data to assess farmworkers’ exposure to two cancer-causing fumigants. By Liza Gross Just before 5 p.m. on the last day of September, Jane Sellen and her colleagues at Californians for…