Pesticides may be making kids sick at school

In California’s long, flat interior, spraying season lasts seven months, from March through September. When citrus trees blossom and grapevines climb trellises, Lemus prays to the Virgin Mary that her granddaughter won’t come home with her eyes watering and head pounding, unable to breathe.

Tulare County, where she lives, is one of the nation’s most fertile farm regions, with more than half the schools within a quarter-mile of agricultural fields, according to the nonprofit Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

As suburbs push close to farmland, the rate of pesticide poisoning among children nationwide has risen in recent years, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found that 40 percent of all children sickened by pesticides at school were victims of drift — pesticide carried on the breeze.

Research on pregnant women exposed to common pesticides has suggested higher rates of premature birth, and poor neurological development and smaller head circumferences among their babies.

The effects on children of small, repeated exposures over a long period of time are unclear, said University of California, Berkeley epidemiologist Brenda Eskenazi.

But acute pesticide poisoning can cause nausea, blurred vision, an abnormally fast heart rate, paralysis and death.

Chrissy Garavito, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, died in Fontana in 1997 of a heart rhythm disturbance her mother believes was triggered by exposure to chemicals sprayed at the school. Authorities never confirmed that pesticides contributed to her death.

‘She was in a stupor’
In 2001, pesticide poisoning nearly killed Elena Dominguez, then a sixth-grader in Wenatchee, Wash.

One day, after playing Frisbee during gym class across the street from an apple orchard, she passed out at her desk.

“She was in a stupor,” said her mother, Cindy Dominguez. “She couldn’t talk, her eyes were rolling back in her head.”

Emergency-room doctors dismissed Elena’s abnormally fast heart rate as a symptom of dehydration, gave her intravenous fluids and sent her home. Three weeks later, it happened again.

“I was at a track meet and all of a sudden I felt really, really tired,” said Elena, now 18. “I made it to the finish line and just fell over.”

Investigators found her clothes were soaked in the pesticide Endosulfan I; it had been picked up from residue on the grass and absorbed into her bloodstream through her skin. Officials later found five other pesticides on school grounds and fined the apple grower for forging his applicator’s license.

The Dominguez family sued the orchard owner and the Wenatchee school district, which established rules requiring students to stay inside after a spraying, among other things. State officials believe it is the only district in Washington with such limitations.

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