Objective: Paraquat poisoning occurs worldwide, and both the fatality rate and the number of deaths are out of the ordinary. Japan is one of the few countries in the world that have replaced 24% products with 5% products. This report is an attempt to introduce information about paraquat poisoning in Japan.

Protecting the health of farmworkers is a crucial issue. Previous studies report that safety training and educational interventions might increase farmworkers’ protective behaviors. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of distributing a checklist as an interventional measure for pesticide protection in rural Asia, where pesticide poisoning is a major problem. This study was a community-based interventional study, using the distribution of a checklist with pesticide protective habits in Narail district, Bangladesh, with a total of 100 eligible males. Two questionnaire surveys were conducted before distributing the checklist and 25 days after. Change between the baseline and follow-up surveys was measured by frequency scores of protective behavior. The average pesticide-protective behavioral score increased from 4.58 in the baseline survey to 8.11 in the follow-up. Additionally, the checklist was more effective in the group with higher education, the younger group, and the group with lower pesticide-protective behavioral scores in the baseline survey. The paper checklist on protective behaviors against pesticide poisoning was effective because of the increase in the frequency of such positive behavior among farmworkers. Thus, intervention measures should be implemented to increase the knowledge and awareness regarding pesticide protection habits to protect the health of farmworkers.

The use of pesticides has rapidly increased in Japan since the end of World War II, significantly reducing work burdens and boosting food production. In the meantime, pesticides, responsible for poisoning and environmental pollution, have for many years posed grave issues that have had to be tackled by scientists of rural medicine for a long period. The Japanese Association of Rural Medicine, founded by the late Toshikazu Wakatsuki, has grappled with those issues for many years. Above all, the association has fulfilled its social obligations, such as by bringing the toxicity of organic mercury to light in animal tests to prompt the government to prohibit its use, and by casting light on birth defects caused by defoliants aerially sprayed during the Vietnam War to urge U.S. military forces to break off herbicide warfare. As it has become possible to make less toxic pesticides available for farm work in recent years, death-inducing accidents have seldom occurred during the spraying of pesticides, and the association's activities are now at a low ebb. Now that pesticides, which after all are biologically toxic compounds, are openly used on farms, there is the need to pay constant attention to their impacts on the human body and the environment. In the future, it is necessary to epidemiologically probe into chronic impacts on the human body and contribute to the prevention of pesticide poisoning in Southeast Asia.

農薬は生物作用をもち開放的に使用されるため，その悪影響を監視し防止する必要がある．我々は農作業従事者の農薬曝露調査を行ってきたが，土壌燻蒸剤クロルピクリンの施用は，彼らにとって危険な作業の一つであり，少なからぬ施用者が呼吸困難などを自覚していた．本報告では，農林水産省の「人に対する事故及び被害の発生状況」から，クロルピクリンによる周辺住民の健康被害状況の把握を試みた．2010−19年の10年間に121人の報告があり，年ごとの発生数はほぼ横ばいであり，月別にみると48%が5月に発生し，年齢別には広い世代にわたっていた．原因の80%がクロルピクリン処理後のフィルム被覆を怠ることによるものであった．自覚症状は，目痛（91%），喉痛（35%），頭痛（14%）の順であった．クロルピクリンを使用する場合，これまでは土壌施用後にポリエチレンフィルムで覆うことが通例となっていた．しかし，近年では，各地の農業技術センターにおいて，難透過性フィルムを用いた技術が開発されている．このフィルムによる被覆により，クロルピクリンを1/3程度に減量してもこれまでと同等の土壌消毒効果が得られ，かつ大気への露出を1/10以下に抑制することができるため，クロルピクリン曝露による健康被害のリスクを低減させることが期待される．実際に，徳島県のサツマイモ産地では難透過性フィルムの被覆が普及した結果，周辺住民からの苦情が減っているという報告がある．さらなる普及を望む．