© 1998 by Oxford University Press
Do pesticides cause cancer? The question has worried scientists and consumers since the late 1960s, when potentially toxic chemicals became big business and the environmental movement got its start in the United States. Because farmers are presumed to be heavily exposed to pesticides, some epidemiologists have looked to studies of farmers for evidence for or against the carcinogenicity of pesticides as a whole.
The trouble is, studies on farmers and cancer have yielded conflicting results. A meta-analysis of 37 such studies from 1949 to 1994, published in the Jan. 1, 1998, Annals Farmers and Cancer: Old Crop of Data Gets New Scrutiny