Pesticides as a Man-Made Vector of Disease
Daena Tappeiner, Dylan Ulat, Gelly Miravet, Stuart
Henderson College of Southern Nevada
Principles of Sociology Professor
Prof. Flora Rudacille
December 7, 2025
Although not a pathogen in the traditional sense, pesticide exposure functions epidemiologically: it is unequally distributed across populations, structurally patterned in predictable ways, causes both acute and chronic health conditions, and remains widely underreported in global datasets (Boedeker et al., 2020; Donley et al., 2022). Exposure occurs through skin contact, inhalation, or ingestion, producing immediate symptoms as well as long-term latent effects comparable to infectious conditions such as Lyme disease, tuberculosis, hepatitis B/C, and HPV (Gangemi et al., 2016). The burden of pesticide-related illness falls disproportionately on socioeconomically vulnerable populations — agricultural workers, migrants, women, children, and surrounding communities — whose heightened risk reflects broader inequities in labor systems, poverty, regulatory enforcement, and environmental health (Donley et al., 2022; López-Gálvez et al., 2019). Because these disparities map directly onto global commitments to gender equity, labor protections, and public health, pesticide exposure is deeply intertwined with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly UNSDG 5: Gender Equality, which emphasizes eliminating gender-based harm and ensuring safe, dignified working conditions for women worldwide. Understanding pesticide exposure as a man-made epidemic — one that mirrors the pathways, transmission patterns, and structural inequalities of traditional infectious diseases — situates this issue within a broader framework of global development, human rights, and cross-national responsibility (UN, 2015). The following sections examine the pathways of exposure, the social and economic stratification that heightens risk for women and migrant agricultural workers, the gendered and biological health effects that follow, and the global policy failures and structural invisibility that allow pesticide-related illness to persist as an overlooked public-health crisis. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate how pesticide exposures function epidemiologically and should be understood as a structural public-health issue that deserves coordinated international action.
Pesticides act as a vector of disease through multiple exposure routes, most notably inhalation, ingestion, and dermal absorption; all of which create both acute and chronic health risks. Agricultural workers are the most directly exposed during mixing, loading, and applying pesticides, but contemporary research shows that exposure extends far beyond active spraying. A large-scale soil analysis across eleven European countries found that 83% of agricultural soils contained pesticide residues, and 62% contained mixtures of two or more chemicals (Silva et al., 2019). Notably, residues were detected even in soils that had not been treated for several years, demonstrating the chemicals’ persistence, mobility, and ability to contaminate ecosystems long after their intended use.
These findings show that pesticides function epidemiologically: they persist in environmental “reservoirs,” spread across geographic areas, and create chronic exposure pathways for entire communities, not only for those directly involved in pesticide handling. These residues create chronic exposure risks for entire communities, not just those directly applying the chemicals. Farmers themselves recognize these interconnections. In Indiana, DeBruicker Valliant (2012) documented farmers’ awareness that land-use decisions, livestock health, and chemical inputs directly affect local families and the overall community’s well-being. Many farmers noted that soil contamination, chemical drift, and livestock exposure directly influence community health, contributing to increased illness and long-term health risks. This perspective reframes pesticide exposure as a public health issue rather than a purely occupational or environmental one, highlighting how its impacts extend beyond individual workers to the broader social and ecological structures that shape agricultural communities.
A major pathway beyond the worksite is the “take-home route,” in which pesticides enter households on clothing, shoes, tools, and skin. A systematic review of more than thirty biomonitoring studies by López-Gálvez et al. (2019) found that children of farmworkers consistently had higher urinary pesticide metabolite levels than non-farmworker children, often two to six times higher, depending on the region and chemical. Environmental sampling studies further show that pesticide residues accumulate in house dust, laundry areas, car seats, and kitchen floors, creating continuous low-level exposure for family members who have never worked in the fields.This pathway demonstrates that pesticide drift extends beyond airborne or environmental routes and becomes socially transmitted, circulating through households and disproportionately affecting children, pregnant family members, and older adults who have never worked in the fields, effectively replicating the transmission patterns of traditional disease.
While economic and socially stratified communities typically face higher risks from pesticide exposures, women are particularly vulnerable. The risks pesticides pose to women's health extend beyond reproductive issues and can also lead to latent illnesses linked to a higher likelihood of chronic disease development. Albadrani et al. (2024) establish a framework connecting pesticide exposure to an elevated risk of breast cancer, reporting that women living in Brazil’s dense agricultural zones faced a 60% higher risk compared to those in non-agricultural areas (Panis & Lemos, 2024). Similarly, Shekhar et al. (2024) illustrate a strong relation between pesticide exposure and systemic autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus — conditions that women already face at elevated baseline risk (Parks et al., 2022). These findings also link pesticide exposure to heightened risk for multiple cancers, including breast, ovarian, prostate, leukemia, and lymphoma, underscoring the severe and systemic threat pesticides pose to women’s long-term health.
Social position further shapes exposure risk. Migrant women in agricultural work often occupy the most undesirable and hazardous labor roles, frequently because these positions are the only ones available to them within stratified labor markets. Chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and even basic amenities such as drinking water ultimately force workers to adopt “bring your own” policies, increasing bodily risk and compounding exposure. Without gloves, masks, or protective clothing, workers’ skin, respiratory systems, and eyes receive direct and repeated exposure to harmful chemicals, UV radiation, and dust. This unprotected exposure triggers immediate acute effects, including chemical burns and respiratory irritation, and accumulates over time to produce chronic conditions such as dermatitis, chronic bronchitis, and musculoskeletal degeneration.
Many migrant agricultural workers lack the power to refuse unsafe work or demand protections, and employers often knowingly expose them by disregarding safety protocols. Most cannot afford basic PPE such as gloves, masks, or sunscreen, and endure premature physical deterioration to maintain employment. In this way, the combination of chemical exposure and inadequate workplace conditions becomes a direct source of harm — one rooted not only in environmental hazard but in economic precarity and structural vulnerability.
Globally, pesticide exposure is pervasive, affecting diverse regions including Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In Pakistan, Bakhsh et al. (2016) found that among female cotton pickers, only 1% could correctly identify pesticides or recognize their harmful effects, and only 18–22% were aware of spraying schedules in the fields where they worked. Nearly all women (98–100%) reported transporting contaminated cotton from fields to farmhouses, practices that, coupled with low awareness, heightened exposure to hazardous chemicals (Bakhsh et al., 2016, p. 8). Due to critical gaps in occupational health education about the chemicals these women handle daily, workers are unable to take even simple precautions to protect themselves or prevent contaminated clothing from entering the household.
Similarly, in Spain, Villa-Cordero et al. (2025) documented extreme working conditions for female migrant farmworkers, including shifts of up to ten hours beginning as early as 3 a.m., which left workers with only five to six hours of rest between workdays — despite legal requirements for a 12-hour break. Chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and even basic amenities such as drinking water ultimately forced workers to adopt “bring your own” policies, further increasing bodily risk and the potential for harm. The resulting physical strain produced chronic fatigue and impaired cognitive functioning, compounding the risks of an already hazardous environment. Without gloves, masks, or protective clothing, workers’ skin, respiratory systems, and eyes were directly exposed to harmful chemicals, UV radiation, and dust. This level of unprotected exposure triggered immediate, acute effects such as chemical burns and respiratory irritation, and accumulated over time to contribute to long-term conditions, including chronic bronchitis, dermatitis, and musculoskeletal damage. Many migrant agricultural workers lack the power to refuse unsafe work or demand protections, and employers often knowingly expose them by disregarding safety protocols. Most cannot afford basic protective equipment such as gloves, masks, or sunscreen, and endure premature physical deterioration to keep their jobs. In this way, the combination of chemical exposure and inadequate workplace conditions becomes a direct source of harm. Additionally, it is worth noting that many of these acute symptoms and latent health effects follow trajectories that closely mirror those of traditionally classified disease vectors, both in form and function.
In Thailand, Lorenz et al. (2012) reported that 11% of pregnant women applied pesticides at work, 51% experienced exposure at home, and 28% personally applied pesticides during pregnancy. Unsafe handling practices risk bringing contaminated clothing into kitchens, bedrooms, or food storage, compounding the risk for both women and their fetuses. During pregnancy, a period of heightened physiological sensitivity, prenatal exposure to organophosphates, carbamates, and organochlorines has been linked to neurotoxicity, as well as cognitive, behavioral, and developmental impairments in the fetus, including birth defects. Unfortunately, the reinforcement for their family’s immediate economic survival comes at the expense of their own long-term health, propagating a system of generational harms when coupled with social expectations for women to uphold both domestic responsibilities and participate in the workforce. Across these regions, exposure intensity is a transnational public health issue, and pesticide-related illnesses constitute a global environmental health crisis.
Despite its widespread health implications, pesticide exposure remains an underrecognized and largely unaddressed global health concern. When examined through the intersecting lenses of gender, labor, and environmental policy, the disparities become particularly stark. As Donley et al. (2022) argue, “People of color and low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to higher levels of pesticides, both occupationally and environmentally, due to systemic racism, economic inequality, and weak regulatory protections” (p. 2). Migrant and agricultural farmworkers, especially within the United States, continue to bear disproportionate harm as a result of regulatory gaps and uneven enforcement. At the global level, Boedeker et al. (2020) estimated approximately 385 million unintentional pesticide poisonings and 11,000 annual deaths. Although this figure has been criticized for relying on extrapolated data, critiques of “overestimation” overlook a central reality: pesticide-related illness is chronically underreported. Given the well-documented weaknesses in surveillance systems — particularly in developing nations where exposure is most severe — Boedeker’s estimate is likely conservative. Studies such as Awaluddin et al. (2021) demonstrate that official reporting systems often capture only a fraction of actual cases, describing underreporting as “a critical barrier to prevention” for workers facing chemical hazards. When these patterns are read alongside earlier evidence of environmental “reservoirs,” take-home exposure, extreme working conditions, and gendered reproductive harms documented in Pakistan, Spain, Thailand, and Brazil, they suggest that what appears in global datasets likely represents only the visible fraction of a much broader, structurally obscured burden of disease.
Policy failures in the U.S. further illustrate how well-documented hazards can persist despite extensive evidence and the existence of agencies specifically tasked with regulating them. As Sellers et al. (2025) describe, “(d)espite multiple risk assessments since the 1990s documenting potential risks to children and farmworkers, chlorpyrifos remained widely used until 2024 when most food and feed uses were finally cancelled” (p. 5). This decades-long delay underscores how political and economic considerations can outweigh public health, even when risks are thoroughly documented. A parallel dynamic appears in Awaluddin et al.’s (2021) analysis of Malaysia’s occupational disease reporting system, where “the underreporting of occupational disease and injury remains a critical barrier to prevention, with agricultural workers particularly vulnerable to pesticide exposure due to inadequate surveillance and poor enforcement of safety regulations” (p. 7). Their findings mirror patterns observed across many rapidly industrializing regions, suggesting that the underreporting documented in Malaysia is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader global trend. Taken together, these studies indicate that the unequal distribution of pesticide-related harms observed in the United States likely reflects even deeper disparities in lower-income countries, where weak regulatory infrastructure, limited labor protections, and insufficient enforcement leave high-risk populations (especially women in migrant agricultural roles) effectively invisible within public health systems. In light of the chronic illnesses, reproductive losses, and intergenerational harms documented throughout this paper, this invisibility is not a neutral gap in knowledge; it is a policy decision that sustains working conditions in which those who sustain global food production remain the least protected, the least counted, and the most disposable within existing structures of labor and health governance.
In conclusion, pesticide exposure operates in many ways like an epidemic, producing both acute and latent health effects and spreading through agricultural work, contaminated food and water, and even contact with residue carried on objects and individuals. As with many well-studied infectious diseases, the pathways of exposure run directly through the basic necessities that sustain human life — an especially relevant concern as agriculture remains central to global development and population growth. What becomes clear across the literature is that this is a genuinely global issue, shaping health outcomes in low-income regions and fully industrialized nations alike. While pesticide exposure poses risks to everyone, from curators to consumers, the research indicates that women in migrant agricultural roles are Pesticides As A Man-Made Vector of Disease 9 particularly vulnerable, not only because of the occupational hazards embedded in their work, but also due to the culturally constructed social responsibilities that compound their risk and magnify their exposure across both workplace and home. These intersecting biological and socioeconomic vulnerabilities mirror the structural patterns found in traditional epidemiology, underscoring why pesticide-related illness must be understood as a man-made disease vector rather than an isolated environmental hazard. Situating these findings within the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (particularly UNSDG 5: Gender Equality) further emphasizes that the global distribution of pesticide-related harm is not merely a matter of environmental exposure, but a reflection of structural inequities that disproportionately endanger women and marginalized labor forces. By treating pesticide exposure through this broader epidemiological lens, we bring necessary visibility to a vitally important public-health issue — one that has remained largely invisible in data and neglected in policy despite its scale. Recognizing pesticide-related illness as both a socioeconomic structural failing and a human rights injustice is not merely an academic exercise; it is a call for meaningful policy reform, for protections that center marginalized populations, and for a reframing of agricultural progress that does not sacrifice the health of the people who sustain it.
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