Changes in some parameters of the blood count among farmers exposed to pesticides
2016
Prokeš, B. | Simikić, M. | Savin, L.
Nowadays agricultural crops are threatened by a large number of pests and plant diseases. Pests and diseases can significantly reduce the expected harvest of agricultural goods. Besides using many different available agricultural measures, nowadays the use of chemicals, or pesticides, is considered to be the most effective way of fighting plant diseases and pests. Pesticides do not affect just body systems and/or organs, but also the stem cells in the bone marrow in the process of forming blood elements, and they can damage the fully formed blood cells in peripheral blood. 89 farmers growing field crops were taken as the sample - landowners or tenants, who are themself working on that land. There are large differences in the amount of time farmers were exposed to the pesticides. Daily exposure was from 3 to 12 hours, and yearly from 2 to 60 days, which mostly depended on the size of the land they were working on. Following blood parameters were tracked in the blood of the tested subjects: the number of red blood cells (erythrocytes), the share of the full blood that red blood cells take up (hematocrit), the concentration of 'blood color' (hemoglobin), the number of white blood cells (leukocytes), the share of white blood cells responsible for body defence (lymphocytes) and the blood platelets. The goal of the research was to explore whether pesticides lead to a disorder in the tracked parameters of the blood count in the farmers that were exposed during their work with and around pesticides. The research results show that exposure to pesticides, as the tested group of farmers had, did not cause any disorders to the tracked parameters in blood count.
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