Intensive agricultural pesticide use has been proposed as a contributing cause of disproportionately high levels of disease in agricultural areas. The Mississippi Delta region, an area of intensive agricultural production, extends into northwest Mississippi and serves as a good location for studying this premise. Discerning the impact of agricultural pesticide use on human health in this region is confounded by the abject poverty, low educational attainment, and racial distribution that characterize the Mississippi Delta. Other regions in the state of Mississippi have different agricultural production, socioeconomic, and demographic characteristics than the Delta region making the state a good model for studying the role of agriculture pesticides in the incidence of disease that is applicable to other agricultural areas of the US. Epidemiology as a discipline allows the discovery and assessment of associations between disease and risk factors such as exposure to pesticides. The overall goal of this project is to use epidemiological methods to attain a better understanding of the ecology of diseases that may be induced by exposure to agricultural pesticides. Although epidemiology by definition looks at disease on a population level, it integrates well with basic science by testing the application of experimental models in the real world. Epidemiology also interacts with basic science research by discovering relationships between outcomes and risk factors, which may generate hypotheses for mechanisms of disease. The research goals of this project are two fold: 1) assess the relationships of pesticide exposure and human disease; and 2) lay the groundwork for more focused hypothesis based studies in the future. To achieve these goals, we have formulated the two following specific aims: 1. Measure the strength of association between the occurrence of human disease within Mississippi counties and the level of pesticide use. The working hypothesis to be tested is that there are associations between specific diseases and exposure to pesticides that are of sufficient magnitude to be measured using county-level incidence rates and pesticide exposure levels. 2. Assess the validity of using historical crop estimates as uniform measures of potential pesticide exposure levels. This will test the hypothesis that county-level information on harvested crop acreage is a reliable and sensitive measure of pesticide use and therefore environmental pesticide levels' within that county.
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