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Reprinted with permission from UC Davis Magazine Editor's Note: Louise Ko received a TSR&TP intercampus travel grant in 1997-98 to collaborate on her research with Dr. Robert Krieger, a toxicologist with the Personal Chemical Exposure Program at UC Riverside. |
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 Strawberry harvesters at work wearing regular cotton shirts and denims. Courtesy photo. |
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| Finding that sometimes it takes a chemical to beat a chemical, UC Davis researchers have developed chemically treated fabric that detoxifies pesticides to which farm workers and even home gardeners are exposed.
Because studies have shown that 97 percent of pesticides entering the body pass through the skin, workers who are exposed to high levels of pesticides currently must wear clothing made of synthetic materials that block out the pesticides. But because those materials don’t "breathe", they are uncomfortable to wear while doing vigorous work. |
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| UC Davis graduate student Louise Ko observed that harvesters in some California strawberry fields wore just regular denim jeans and t-shirts, rather than suffer the discomfort of protective gear. As an alternative, Ko and Gang Sun, an assistant professor of textiles and clothing at UC Davis, treated cotton/polyester fabric with a chemical called hydantoin, which breaks down agricultural pesticides known as carbamates into small, harmless fragments. And importantly, they found that clothes made from the new material could be cleaned and the detoxifying chemicals reactivated simply by washing them with chlorine bleach. In contrast, the synthetic protective clothing, once contaminated, must be disposed of, which is costly and poses a secondary environmental problem. |
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| Ko explained that their goal is not to entirely replace existing protective clothing "but to come up with comfortable, economical clothing that will protect workers who have lower, but chronic, exposure to pesticides." Laboratory tests showed that it took less than five minutes for the treated fabrics to degrade some carbamate pesticides by as much as 99 percent. The technique has not yet been tested on another group of agricultural pesticides known as organophosphates, which includes pesticides such as malathion, now commonly used on alfalfa and strawberries. |
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| Carbamates and organophosphorous pesticides are applied to a wide variety of field crops including corn and cotton, as well as to fruits and vegetables. The idea for the pesticide-protective fabric was a spin-off from related work in Professor Sun’s laboratory in which anti-bacterial chemicals were placed in fabric used to make surgical gowns for medical professionals and patients. That process for creating anti-bacterial fabric was patented by the University of California and the technology licensed to Halosource Corp. of Seattle Washington. |
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