By 2003, plenty of data suggested that pesticide drift was harming communities, but the pesticide industry and regulators refused to act.
For 20 years, the California Air Resources Board had been conducting experiments, looking for pesticides in the air around fields sprayed with pesticides. They found them. In 2003, PAN pulled together and analyzed this information in a breakthrough report, Secondhand Pesticides. We found that many pesticides remained in the air near fields at high levels for hours, or even days after application. Anyone in the vicinity of such applications faced exposure.
Sept. 9, 2008 Drift Catcher selected as 2008 Tech Awards Laureate by the Tech Museum of Innovation
PAN's air monitoring device, invented by chemist and senior scientist Dr. Susan Kegley, was designated a 2008 Tech Awards Laureate, one of 25 global innovations recognized each year for applying technology to benefit humanity and spark global change.
The Tech Awards, a signature program of The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, selected the Drift Catcher from among hundreds of nominations representing 68 countries, for "empowering communities for health and sustainability" to measure concentrations of hazardous pesticides as evidence to prevent exposure to pesticide drift.
In over 20 years of our own direct field work with agricultural communities, PAN's international network had heard countless stories about how drift-affected communities had come to expect illness, nausea, rashes, and worse in the hours and days after fields had been sprayed. So, with communities across the country asking us to do something about drift, we invented the an air monitoring system we call the "Drift Catcher." It's affordable, robust and based on the same technology used by the California Air Resources Board in its studies.
The big idea? Put the tools necessary to prove pesticide drift into the hands of people who live through it. Make sure those tools are reliable and useable - the rest is just science.
Since its 2003 launch, Drift Catchers have been used in 27 projects in nine states by scores of trained volunteers and community leaders. Below are two case studies.
South Woods Elementary School in St. Johns County, Florida, is bordered on three sides by a large seed farm that sprays pesticides throughout the school year. Motivated by concerns about the health of the children at the school, residents of the county have been using the Drift Catcher to monitor the air near the school since 2006.
Exposure to the chemicals we found by South Woods Elementary are associated with a wide range of adverse health effects: endosulfan interferes with hormones and is linked with autism, birth defects and delayed puberty; diazinon is neurotoxic; and trifluralin and chlorothalonil are suspected to cause cancer. All are particularly dangerous for children.
Maybe now the school board will recognize the pesticide problem & take more serious actions to prevent future drift.– Alex Lowe, student in Hastings
In addition to focusing local, regional, and national media attention on the issue of pesticide drift, the reports on the 2006 and 2007 sampling have led the formulation of state policy recommendations on school siting and have been used by PANNA it’s campaign for the phaseout of endosulfan.
Lindsay, CA, is a predominately Latino community in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley. The town grew up around orange trees, and most of its homes and schools are situated right next to groves where neurotoxic organophosphates are routinely sprayed. Acute exposure to these insecticides can cause nausea and vomiting, tremors and seizures, and even death; studies link chronic exposure with asthma and learning disabilities.
A local group, El Quinto Sol de America, used Drift Catchers from 2004 to 2006 to document the movement of chlorpyrifos (a neurotoxic, organophosphate insecticide) out the groves and into their yards. Here's a map of the Lindsay project, and a 4-pg summary of the results.
Results from biomonitoring and drift catching in Lindsay have since become the bedrock of efforts to win no spray buffer zones around schools and residential areas. Local activists in Tulare, Kern, and other agricultural counties across California have used these result to successfully push their County Agriculture Commissioners for buffer zones around schools and other sensitive sites.