Quick Take
A widely cited claim that Santa Cruz County's childhood cancer rate is 38% above the state average is muddling the debate about pesticide reform, writes Watsonville activist and retired nurse Kathleen Kilpatrick. The number doesn't prove pesticides cause cancer and shouldn't be used that way, she writes. But correcting that statistic doesn't change the broader body of evidence linking pesticide exposure to childhood cancer and other serious health harms. Driscoll’s, the largest berry marketer in the world, has the resources to reduce its use of the most hazardous pesticides and should publicly show its progress, not debate cancer numbers, she writes.
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A Lookout Community Voices op-ed published in March cited data on childhood cancer rates in Santa Cruz County as evidence of harm from toxic pesticides. It generated some dramatic actions and a chain of controversy, as activists (mostly online) used the article and other questionable data as “proof” that the pesticides used in berry farming are causing childhood cancer.
A recurring theme, and the number that started this particular kerfuffle: the claim that Santa Cruz County has a 38% higher childhood cancer rate than the state average, with the implication that the rise is caused by pesticides, and is disproportionately affecting children of farmworkers.
Since then, letters to the editor and guest commentaries have multiplied; the head of the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau weighed in, as did Driscoll’s in a full-page ad in the Sentinel. In the ad, future CEO Brie Reiter Smith persuasively presented her family business as friend and beneficiary to our community.
PESTICIDES IN THE PAJARO VALLEY: Read more Lookout news and Community Voices opinion coverage here
Three other large berry companies, the California Berry Commission and multiple small growers are based in the Pajaro Valley. But Driscoll’s has been here for well over 100 years, with research centers on each side of the valley. Family members still live in and around the valley’s verdant and plastic-coated sweep.
Driscoll’s is the largest berry marketer in the world, and this is not the first time it has faced criticism. Critiques of its corporate practice have abounded, including in a 2017 New Yorker article and a Ventura County lawsuit accusing Driscoll’s of ignoring pesticide laws.
Calls for a boycott erupted in 2016, and farmworker activist Dolores Huerta revived them recently in the Pajaro Valley. Conventionally grown strawberries have topped the Environmental Working Group’s “dirty dozen” list for years. (This year, kale and spinach bumped them to third.)
Driscoll’s has the resources and controls the supply chain and could be making huge strides to make us all feel safer living in a berry-producing region. Instead, it is zeroing in on one source of questionable data on childhood cancer statistics and sidestepping questions about its pesticide use.
When the Lookout op-ed came out, I was skeptical of that percentage. I was a school nurse in Pajaro Valley Unified School District for 17 years, and I thought if our students’ cancer rate was exceptionally high, we nurses would have noticed. The source of the numbers, a table from the national cancer registry, ranked counties by incidence of cancer in children and youth ages 0 to 19 from 2017 to 2021.
The site is interactive, and I tried numerous variations. Yes, Santa Cruz County ranked second, but the number of cases wasn’t high. And if sorted by white and Hispanic (terms the registry uses), more white kids had cancer in our county. When ranked just for Hispanic kids, our county dropped to seventh. San Francisco was second. Beyond our state borders, California ranked 33. The top three states were Maine, Vermont and Utah.
Interpreting medical data is not intuitive and the power of narrative is strong. When I tried to convince members of groups I work with on pesticide reform not to use 38% as evidence, I did not succeed.
I then started hearing rumors that others had questioned the statistic, including a reference to “junk science” during a meeting friends had with the head of our county office of education. And, at a meeting with Campaign for Organic Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) members, Smith requested medical journal articles for reference.
I didn’t find out until recently that in September (during Omar Dieguez’s well-publicized fast to protest pesticide use), the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency had initiated its own investigation, produced a slideshow and requested further evaluation of the registry data from the state Department of Health. Apparently, both were shared with people in positions of authority in the county, including at least one supervisor.
The documents weren’t shared with us, the activists.
By the time I heard of them and got copies through a friend, in mid-May, the line to the misleading number had blurred. It had already become online fodder for the post-truth era we now inhabit.
It’s easy to misrepresent and misinterpret medical statistics. But we don’t like it when Monsanto cooks the books. We don’t like the California Department of Pesticide Regulation using its numbers to offer false reassurance. We don’t like being discredited when we have real concerns.
We need to avoid these traps by being self-corrective.
So what’s true?
In the U.S., childhood cancers are rare, but have been rising. They are fatal about 10% of the time, a rate that’s dropped by more than half over the past 50 years. Around 60% of kids with cancer will have lifetime health consequences. On paper, cancer rates in white kids are rising faster than in Hispanic and other races and ethnic groups.
In Santa Cruz County, they have almost doubled over the past 35 years; county rates in Hispanic kids have varied, but risen some. As the county analyses, the farm bureau and Reiter Smith all state, this is “consistent with statewide data for similar populations.“ In California, almost twice as many kids are identified as Hispanic as white, so we have more cases of childhood cancer in the Hispanic group.
Two kinds of leukemia, abbreviated as ALL and AML, are the most common types of childhood cancer. ALL is 1.5 to 2 times more common in Hispanics. (The state groups cases from Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties together and produced a similar number, 1.7 times.)
There is evidence of genetic risks, possibly compounded or caused by toxic exposures in pregnancy and early childhood. Multiple studies have found links to pesticides in home use, parental occupation and proximity to fields, for these and other kinds of childhood cancer. An annotated bibliography produced by nonprofit Beyond Pesticides in 2021 lists 20 journal articles linking pesticide exposure to central nervous system tumors and 48 pesticide and leukemia studies.
Other cancers have also been linked to perinatal and childhood pesticide exposure, as well as other serious diseases and developmental and learning issues.
If we put any credence in the statistics in the national cancer registry, increased childhood cancer is happening in affluent communities as well as in the Pajaro Valley and Watsonville. Higher income is one factor associated with increased rates, although this could be due to better healthcare access and awareness of early symptoms.
Children from “minority” groups are, however, more likely to die from their cancers.
And medical providers from the two local clinics that serve farmworker families, and oncology nurses at Stanford University, have shared concerns that the brown kids they care for are disproportionately affected. The documents produced by both the county and state health departments reference evidence showing increased risks from pesticide exposure, and the state Department of Pesticide Regulation acknowledges in its own reports that we are not collecting the data that might link disease to that exposure.
The weight of evidence
We do know proximity to pesticide applications is associated with higher levels found in body fluids and tissues. Pregnant women and young children are particularly vulnerable to exposure to toxins. The Pajaro Valley is younger and has a higher birth rate than the county overall.
It also gets more pesticide poundage than the rest of the county, including the overwhelming bulk of the most toxic pesticides. So it should come as no surprise that some residents feel dumped on.
Santa Cruz County now has a website summarizing childhood cancer data, which reiterates and explicates the previous reports. From 2018 to 2022, 20 children and teens in South County were identified with cancer, 16 of them Hispanic. Types of cancer were consistent with other greater Bay Area communities.
If you have dealt with childhood cancer, you know: Having a child with a life-threatening illness is a life-changing catastrophe. That’s why our farmworker families and local groups like Safe Ag Safe Schools, Lideres Campesinas and CORA, are finding common cause with Moms Against Monsanto, MAHA moms and Mamavation. We all want fewer toxins in our food and in our environment.
And if we have to get cancer (I got mine), we want it toward the end of our life, not at the beginning.
The groups I work with have focused on schools, starting with pesticide use both on school grounds and nearby. Our horizons have expanded since, to our Pajaro Valley ecosystem and beyond, but the rationale remains the same.
We can’t control all the variables in our kids’ lives. We are failing at income inequality, and racial and social justice and global warming. But we can reduce exposure to toxic pesticides by reducing their use. Conversion to organic, starting by schools and homes, is CORA and SASS’ preferred methodology, but there are interim steps.
Driscoll’s says it has the leadership, scientific expertise and grower network to lead agriculture toward more sustainable practices. If that’s true, it also has the ability to reduce the use of the most hazardous pesticides and publicly demonstrate its progress.
It can reduce its use of highly toxic pesticides on fields it controls, both directly and via contract growers. (Driscoll’s has more control over growers’ inputs than it publicly admits.) And it controls more than half of the organic berry market, including, to some degree, the price consumers pay.
So here’s the gauntlet I’ll throw down: Show us your progress, Driscoll’s.
One thing the state is good at: It collects and stores reams of data on pesticide use in California. To start, why not focus on the two categories local activists and parent groups want eliminated – fumigants and organophosphates?
How about reviewing trend data from five recent years for berries (strawberries, raspberries, blackberries) within the boundaries of Pajaro Valley Unified School District (almost 8 million pounds applied in 2019-23) and in the state and setting a target for reduction?
Then publicize your progress, and we’ll help spread the word.
Health influencers are down on Driscoll’s, and on strawberries in general. But when it comes to growing berries, Driscoll’s is the world’s Influencer-in-Chief.
Conventional berry takedowns are already getting attention online, and they’re not pretty. Markets and reputations might soon feel the strain.
This is the right time, and the Pajaro Valley is a good place to start. Let’s go …
Kathleen Kilpatrick has been a midwife, done pediatric and geriatric home care, worked in a farmworkers clinic, taught nursing and worked in Pajaro Valley Unified School District from 2000 to 2017, where she served as team leader for district health services. She is committed to continuing work on public health issues as key aspects of social and environmental justice.
