Green tobacco sickness: an occupational hazard among tobacco harvesters.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Ballard T
• Description:
  Green tobacco sickness is an occupational hazard for tobacco harvesters. It is a form of nicotine poisoning that is caused by transdermal absorption of nicotine that's dissolved on the moisture on the wet tobacco plant. The main signs and symptoms are nausea and vomiting, weakness and dizziness. There is an initial tachycardia and hypertension that is followed by a lowering of the heart rate and blood pressure in the more severe cases. These signs and symptoms are very similar to that for organophosphate pesticide poisoning and also for heat exhaustion. Green tobacco sickness is a self limited condition. It usually lasts only one to two days but it can be very incapacitating during those couple of days. There have been very few reports of green tobacco sickness in the medical literature. The only two from the United States up until this year were in Florida in 1970 and North Carolina in '73. In the North Carolina Study, the researchers were able to document that non-smoking tobacco harvesters were absorbing large amounts of nicotine as measured by a urinary cotinene, this is a primary metabolite of nicotine. They also found in their studies that non-smokers were a much greater risk for developing green tobacco sickness than smokers.
• Subjects:
  Accidents, Occupational Manufacturing And Industrial Facilities Occupational Health Safety Staff Development
• Keywords:
  Agricultural-industry Agricultural-processes Agricultural-workers Agriculture Cardiovascular-system-disorders Employee-exposure Employee-health Farmers Gastrointestinal-system-disorders Health-hazards Health-protection Occupational-diseases Occupational-exposure Occupational-hazards Occupational-health Occupational-safety-programs Organo-phosphorus-compounds Organo-phosphorus-pesticides Pesticides Pesticides-and-agricultural-chemicals Poisons Protective-clothing Protective-materials Protective-measures Safety-practices Safety-programs Safety-research Statistical-analysis Tobacco Tobacco-constituents Tobacco-industry Worker-health Workers Workplace-monitoring Workplace-studies

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• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Genre:
  Conference/Symposia Proceedings
• Place as Subject:
  Georgia ; Kentucky ; Ohio ; OSHA Region 4 ; OSHA Region 5
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Division:
  DSHEFS - Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations, and Field Studies
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  67-71
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20027101
• Citation:
  Proceedings of the NIOSH Symposium on Efforts to Prevent Injury and Disease Among Agricultural Workers, August 25-27, 1993, Lexington, Kentucky. Washington, DC: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 1994 Jul; :67-71
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  1994
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Source Full Name:
  Proceedings of the NIOSH Symposium on Efforts to Prevent Injury and Disease Among Agricultural Workers
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:dcc5de6d7d2e16eacd62c0a19711c83a864b7485e54daf6fa7a605a1574357d518b1ed85bcaad06a52cf3cede1ee59077fc702fc0a6e6331a083e442e2a2e483
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/181292/cdc_181292_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 861.89 KB ]