The incidence of skin disease in California agricultural workers was reported for the years 1978 to 1983 by Standard Industrial Classification. The results were taken from the Supplementary Data System for California agricultural businesses. Only those injuries or illnesses resulting in one or more days lost work were included. There were 11.5 cases per 10,000 employees, and 77.6 percent of claimants were male. Plants were the greatest cause of injury or illness representing 50 percent of the cases followed by chemical exposure (20.4 percent) and food products (12.5 percent). The highest number of plant dermatology claims were in forestry, landscaping services, horticulture and soil preparation services which produced 53.5, 35.9, 15.9 and 9.9 cases per 10,000 employees, respectively. The occupations reporting exposure to chemicals were horticulture, crop services, poultry and egg production, vegetables and melons, general crop farms and soil preparation services. Employees in vegetable and melon production also experienced a high rate of exposure to food products. The authors suggest further studies to elucidate specific plants and chemicals that cause disease or injury to agricultural employees.
Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cannot attest to the accuracy of a non-federal website.
Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
You will be subject to the destination website's privacy policy when you follow the link.
CDC is not responsible for Section 508 compliance (accessibility) on other federal or private website.
For more information on CDC's web notification policies, see Website Disclaimers.
CDC.gov Privacy Settings
We take your privacy seriously. You can review and change the way we collect information below.
These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.
Cookies used to make website functionality more relevant to you. These cookies perform functions like remembering presentation options or choices and, in some cases, delivery of web content that based on self-identified area of interests.
Cookies used to track the effectiveness of CDC public health campaigns through clickthrough data.
Cookies used to enable you to share pages and content that you find interesting on CDC.gov through third party social networking and other websites. These cookies may also be used for advertising purposes by these third parties.
Thank you for taking the time to confirm your preferences. If you need to go back and make any changes, you can always do so by going to our Privacy Policy page.