The Sunshine State's Pesticide Problem

[ensho]

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/06/the-sunshine-states-pesticide-problem/240377/


Thousands of black farm laborers have suffered kidney failure, birth defects, and worse—and Florida isn't compensating them



No wonder Tea Party activists love Florida governor Rick Scott. To save a pittance on the state's budget, Scott, who has a personal net worth of more than $200 million, thanks in part to his having been president of a healthcare company that perpetrated the biggest medical fraud in United States history, vetoed a bill earlier this month that finally would have brought relief to 2,500 poverty-plagued African American farm laborers. Over the course of five decades, these people were poisoned on a daily basis by a witch's brew of pesticides.

I met Linda Lee, one of the afflicted workers, last summer when she took me on a "pesticide tour" of the land near Lake Apopka, a few miles northeast of Orlando. Leaning on her cane in the scorching midday June sun, Lee, who is 57, matter-of-factly listed her medical conditions: diabetes, lupus, high blood pressure, emphysema, and arthritis. Her hip had to be replaced and her gall bladder removed. Her kidneys failed, so she had a transplant. She also had two corneal implants. Asked what caused her woes, she didn't hesitate: As a farm laborer on the shores of Lake Apopka in the 1970s and 1980s, she was routinely exposed to agricultural chemicals as she worked in the fields. "Plenty of my old friends and neighbors got what I got, and a lot of them got stuff I don't want to get," she told me.

In a survey of workers conducted in 2006, the Farmworker Association of Florida found that 92 percent of the agricultural workers in the region had been exposed to pesticides through a combination of aerial spraying, wind drifting from applications on adjacent fields, touching plants still wet with pesticides, and inhaling pesticides. In a state where the average incidence of birth defects is 3 percent, 13 percent of the Apopka workers had a child born with a defect.

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Finally, state senator Gary Siplin, a Democrat, put an allocation of $500,000 for the Apopka workers in the $70 billion 2011 budget. Surprisingly, that budget passed the house and senate, both overwhelmingly Republican, only to be vetoed by Governor Scott. "We were so close," Lee said. "The governor just canceled out our hard work. He broke the spirits of so many in South Apopka that really need healthcare and don't receive it."
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guess as these worker sicken and die off the Fl. Ag. Barons will borrow slaves from the Fl. private prison Barons

and the money wheel keeps turning

[Ezlivin]

1. It reduces voter fraud

Those ill workers can't fuck up Republican plans for Utopia.

If they only would realize that this is for the best and that their sacrifice will make possible further tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy!

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. Wonder if this had anything to do with the information I had with my lawn guy.

I'm always finicky about the poisons he puts down because I don't want it to kill the wildlife. He said not to worry because they've all been told to cut down on the pesticides they spray on the lawns.