Growing rice with your life should not come at a devalued price; sometimes one breath exhaled contains 13 kinds of pesticides.
Rice is a staple food in many parts of Asia, and Malaysians consume an average of 2.5 plates of rice per day. As Malaysia's basic food source, the paddy and rice industry receives special attention from the government and is also an important source of income for the country. To increase rice yields, farmers often use pesticides, but at the same time the pesticide environmental pollution caused has become an unavoidable and urgent problem to solve.
Long-term human exposure to pesticides can cause serious adverse health effects, such as acute neurotoxicity and chronic neurotoxicity. At present, most workers with long-term pesticide exposure are farmers, who come into contact with pesticides through direct and indirect inhalation during the preparation (mixing and loading) and application (spraying) of pesticides, resulting in pesticide residues in the human body. During human exposure to pesticides, pesticides can be inhaled through the lung surface and then seep into other parts of the body through the bloodstream; after prolonged exposure, they can cause serious adverse health effects, and cancer, nerve damage, abnormal liver function, renal insufficiency and Parkinson's syndrome are all related to this. Lack of awareness of safe pesticide use, lack of personal protective equipment and poor personal hygiene habits are the three important reasons that increase farmers' exposure to pesticide threats. Surveys show that among farmers growing rice, only 8.4% used appropriate personal protective measures, while 91.6% did not wear any personal protective equipment.
The team of Hazwanee Hamsan studied the concentrations of commonly used insecticides in the exhaled breath of rice farmers and whether these concentrations pose a health threat to the farmers. 83 farmers from Kampung Kuala Selangor in Tanjung Karang, Malaysia, participated in this study; the researchers separately collected the exhaled breath of each volunteer and analyzed the pesticide residue components in the exhaled breath.
The research results showed that among the 83 personal exhaled air samples, pesticide residues were detected in 82 (one failed to obtain enough sample because the air pump was accidentally turned off during the gas collection process). Specifically, up to thirteen pesticides were detected in the exhaled breath of the rice farmers. In descending order of frequency of occurrence, they were tricyclazole, tebuconazole, chlorantraniliprole, isoprothiolane, trifloxystrobin, difenoconazole, fipronil, pretilachlor, pymetrozine, imidacloprid, buprofezin, propiconazole and azoxystrobin. Among them, tricyclazole (the most frequently detected pesticide) and azoxystrobin (the least frequently detected pesticide) both belong to fungicides (fungicides are widely used in the vegetative growth, reproductive and maturity stages of rice in order to minimize the occurrence of crop diseases and maintain the yield of agricultural products). Because farmers believe that compared with azoxystrobin, tricyclazole is low in price and good in effect, most farmers in the region choose to use tricyclazole, which is one of the reasons why this pesticide was detected the most times.
Table 1. Pesticide residue components detected in the exhaled breath of rice farmers.
The research results also pointed out that multiple pesticides were always detected in a single person's exhaled breath sample, and among all detected pesticide residues, pretilachlor had the highest average concentration (107.19 ng/m3), while imidacloprid had the lowest average concentration (18.96 ng/m3). The highest detected concentrations of pesticide residues ranged from 47.80 ng/m3 (azoxystrobin) to 462.50 ng/m3 (fipronil).
The data obtained in this study are very useful for farmers' health risk management. We recommend providing farmers with appropriate training on pesticide use and appropriately using personal protective equipment to reduce farmers' risk of exposure to pesticides.