Providing pesticide safety training to farmworker families: Evaluation of an intervention to translate research to practice

The Worker Protection Standard mandates pesticide safety training for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. However, no safety training is required for family members, who often must implement home sanitation and hygiene practices to protect against paraoccupational pesticide exposure. Although several limited studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of pesticide education programs for farmworker families, there have been no large, carefully evaluated demonstration projects placing these in the public health sphere. This project translates an effective intervention to improve farmworker family knowledge of pesticide safety to a broader public health context.

Six public health agencies recruited promotoras from the farmworker community. Promotoras were trained to enroll families with a child ≤ 12 years and administer a culturally and educationally appropriate curriculum of six lessons in the home. Independently conducted pre/post tests evaluated 18 learning objectives.

Adults (usually mothers) in 610 families completed the study over 18 months. Most were from Mexico; 62% had <9th grade education; 90% reported 5+ promotora visits. Significant increases in knowledge occurred across all 18 learning objectives, including knowledge of long-term consequences of pesticide exposure (correct knowledge increased: 19% to 71%), integrated pest management approaches (1% to 56%), how to convince others to adopt pesticide safety behaviors (8% to 52%), and minimizing the exposure of unborn babies and children (52% to 99%).

This project demonstrates that this curriculum produces improvements in knowledge of ways to protect farmworker families from pesticide exposure. It also shows that women from the farmworker community, with limited training, can effectively carry out this program.