In addition, there was confusion amongst users in

some countries about whether items of clothing such as a long sleeved shirt, long trousers or boots could be described as items of PPE. It is not surprising that the regression models were unable to confirm the value of certain practices as there is a considerable variation between countries in the importance of various factors as indicated in figures 1 and 2. For example, Mexican users were the least confident in the survey (only 5% of Mexican users felt that their use of PPE for spraying was the buy Alisertib safest practice), but their agrochemical incident rates were amongst the lowest. Atkin and Leisinger (2000) also noted this variation and the difficulty of measuring the “impact of isolated interventions in a dynamic social environment”. Far more incidents were attributed to insecticide usage than to fungicide or

MK-2206 in vivo herbicide usage, but information was not collected about all the agrochemicals used by respondents and the quantities used. Users were asked to estimate the proportion of time spent spraying pesticides in the different sectors and relative to this measure, the data suggested that the incidence rate for insecticide-related incidents was 5–10 times higher than that for herbicides or fungicides. Users may have disliked insecticides more because of their smell and been more inclined to think that they were the cause of their health problems, but other pesticides such as paraquat have a very strong smell. Other investigators have reported a high proportion of incidents attributed to insecticides. Das et al. (2001) noted that a few categories of insecticides

accounted for over half of the acute illnesses reported by migrant workers in California and Calvert et al. (2004) reported that insecticides were responsible Methocarbamol for almost half of acute pesticide-related illnesses reported to the US SENSOR surveillance scheme. In addition, the studies that have reported some of the highest rates of pesticide-related signs and symptoms, e.g., Chitra et al. (2006) and Yassin et al. (2002), have studied populations that predominantly sprayed insecticides. The results of the survey, although not as clear as had been hoped, do highlight some important messages such as the importance of caution. The strong association observed between other types of accident on the farm and agrochemical incidents suggests that agrochemical use training needs to be set in a wider safety context of identifying unsafe acts and managing risks. The sponsor company is addressing this by putting more emphasis on straightforward overall safety messages such as the five key steps of safe use described above, and has worked with global experts to develop improved training materials. More than three million users were trained in these practices in 2008 by the sponsor company and its cooperators.