A good heat illness prevention plan takes into account the need for more breaks, a cool place to rest, the availability of fluids, and the careful allotment of time for a worker to become fully adjusted or acclimatized to the heat.
You can easily find out using CalEnviroScreen, an online environmental health screening tool that scores each of the state’s 8000 census tracks for pollution burden and population characteristics.
WCAHS celebrated California Ag Day 2016 at the State Capitol on March 16th. California Ag Day is an annual event that celebrates the amazing diversity and productivity of California agriculture and the people who work in it.
Eddie and his co-workers have been working throughout the summer season on CA farms to better understand how to prevent heat illness associated with farm work. Data collected includes the internal temperature of participants as they work, how much water they drink, and on-site weather conditions.
Professor Fadi Fathallah, engineer Victor Duraj, and others at the UC Agricultural Ergonomics Research Center (UC AERC) are continuing their earlier work funded by NIOSH Community Partners for Healthy Farming Intervention that showed some workers who harvest peaches and nectarines prefer a ladder with shorter spacing between steps.
Independent Hmong farmers can learn about USDA financial assistance available to them through a bilingual video produced by the National Hmong American Farmers (NHAF).
The PBS FRONTLINE 2013 documentary, “Rape in the Fields,” highlights undocumented women from California’s Salinas and Fresno areas as well as Washington’s Yakima Valley experience with sexual harassment and rape suffered at the hands of their supervisors.
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) threatened by potential funding loss as the US Congress considers the Fiscal Year 2015 budget.
The best agricultural safety videos can be found on the U.S Agricultural Safety and Health Centers YouTube channel. The channel is a joint project of the 10 Agricultural Centers funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
WCAHS Member and Distinguished Professor Bruce Hammock, a member of the National Academy of Science, and his lab are developing a portable pesticide test that can be run on location to quickly and cost effectively detect if agricultural or landscape workers have been exposed to pesticides.
New research, published in the April issue of the Annals of Epidemiology, by Dr. Paul Leigh of the WCAHS, finds that approximately 77% of non-fatal occupational injuries and illnesses in agriculture go unreported.
