Child Tobacco Farmers Health Risk
Published on October 16, 2009 1:36 PM
Every day more and more children are exposed to toxic levels of nicotine. For example in many countries hundreds of thousands of children are thought to be working full-time on tobacco farms, suffering from toxic levels of nicotine exposure and offensive labor conditions.
Researchers found that in Malawi there are an estimated 78,000 boys and girls employed in tobacco harvesting. On average they earn 17 cents for a 12-hour day of back-breaking, bare-handed work, according to a recent research.
At the end of the investigation of those Malawian children, scientists found that handling burley tobacco leaves without gloves, in unwashed clothes and rarely bathing, these children can absorb the same amount of nicotine in one day of harvesting that they would from smoking 50 cigarettes.
A Malawian child tobacco farmer said at the end of the working day: "Sometimes it feels like you don't have enough breath...You reach a point where you cannot breathe because of the pain in your chest. Then the blood comes when you vomit. At the end, most of this dies and then you remain with a headache." Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center explained: "Nicotine is water solvable and can enter via the skin, so if it has recently rained, or there is heavy dew, the nicotine migrates into the water on the leaf. If that water gets on to your shirt it essentially becomes a giant nicotine patch."
Spiller also has researched Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS) in children working on tobacco farms in the U.S., but when he has studied the children from Malawi he told that the Malawi children's symptoms were absolutely consistent with GTS. In 2007 UNICEF estimated that 29 percent of children ages five to 14-years-old in Malawi worked, and that the majority of those children worked in agriculture. And also there are more than 30,000 smallholder farmers in tobacco production and the crop contributes 70 percent of foreign exchange and 30 percent of GDP.
The last research showed once again that danger of nicotine poisoning is real and that better regulation and monitoring is needed. Mr. Spiller added: "There are a couple of things that could prevent this, like you should wash or change shirts." "We are busy working and we don't have time to go for bathing, so we develop those sores," one 15-year-old girl told Clacherty.
Glynis Clacherty interviewed the 44 children that worked full-time on both large estates and small family farms, but none were working for their own families, and 36 of them were orphans. The main reason the children gave for working was poverty: lack of food, clothing or money to go to school.
"A lot think it is fine for children to work. They don't see the dangers of the pesticides or the opportunity cost of not going to school," said Susan Gunn, an expert in hazardous child labor at the International Labor Organization (ILO), referring to farmers in East Africa. In recent years multinational tobacco corporations have been rapidly unsteady farming production away from rich countries like the United States. Nearly 75 percent of tobacco production is now done in developing countries such as Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, China, Brazil and India.
