NEW YORK, Dec 18: From California's central valley to Florida's strawberry fields, tens of thousands of children work in a sea of toxic chemicals whose long-term health effects are almost completely unknown.

In California's onion fields, farm workers, including children, are exposed to Methyl Parathion, a potent nerve toxin. Among Florida's strawberry fields they encounter Captan, a probable human carcinogen. In midwestern cucumber patches they face Endosulfan, a chemical that may cause a host of health problems because of its similarity to human hormones.

Government standards for pesticide residues in US food supply are set with special attention to the children who eat that food. Yet those standards intentionally ignore a more vulnerable class of children working kids who help harvest America's food.

Those who work in the fields receive pesticide doses many times higher than the law allows in American diets. It's difficult to say exactly how much higher, because the research needed to find out simply hasn't been done.

``Everybody talks about protecting children, and they don't do anything to protect child workers,'' said Marion Moses, a paediatrician with the pesticide education center in San Francisco.

An unreleased US Department of Labour survey shows that 123,000 children between the ages of 14 and 17 work in America's fields. There are thousands more under 14 who go uncounted. Children as young as 4 years, were found to be working on fields. Mothers who can't afford day care carry infants into the fields. In Ohio this summer, 6-year-old Ramiro Silva and his sister picked pesticide-dusted cucumbers and ate them unwashed for lunch. Alejandra Renteria, also 6, sometimes refused to wear rubber gloves because they were too big and clumsy for her. ``My arms get itchy sometimes, but I like to work,'' Ramiro said. Itchy irritations are common in pesticide exposure.

``Protecting the health of our children is one of our highest priorities,'' US environmental protection agency administrator Carol Browner told a conference of doctors and scientists in September.

But until this year, the federal government spent next to nothing for occupational health and safety research on child farm workers. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health did hand out $ 2.5 million for research on injuries to child farm workers, but the effort pales next to the $ 700 million the US department of agriculture's agricultural research service spends each year on crop and livestock studies.

Confirmed incidents of acute pesticide poisoning are rare or at least rarely reported. Of greater concern to experts is long-term, low-level damage that can show up decades after a child has picked his or her last berry. Compared to late-in-life exposures, exposures to pesticides early in life an lead to a greater risk of chronic effects that are expressed only after long latency periods have elapsed,'' a National Academy of Sciences Committee said in a 1993 report.

The report focussed on pesticides in children's diets. It cited a number of reasons to believe that youngsters are especially sensitive to toxic chemicals. A child's rapid growth can be disrupted or interrupted by chemicals. They also have a lot more years left to develop cancer and other long-term health problems. That's why the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 requires the environmental protection agency to consider children, who are most vulnerable to such health effects, when it sets limits for pesticides in food.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.