Review of Health Effects Research - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 86

The participation of potential AFF partners has ebbed and flowed. When
state-level agricultural safety specialist offices were receiving U.S. Department of
Agriculture funding, numerous agricultural extension safety professionals were
directly involved in research conducted by the extramurally funded Ag Centers.
Organizations such as Farm Safety 4 Just Kids, the National Institute for Farm
Safety, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation have partnered with the AFF Program on
strategic initiatives. Other professional organizations—such as the Environmental
and Occupational Health Assembly (of the American Thoracic Society), the Ameri-
can Industrial Hygiene Association, and the American Society of Agricultural and
Biological Engineers—have provided insight into and critiques of both planned
and current activities. More recent stakeholder involvement has positioned workers'
compensation insurance entities in roles complementary to research endeavors
through their deployment of experimental translational programs.
The committee has noted that, in light of the plethora of potential AFF Program
initiatives, prudent allocation of resources is required. Lacking formal continuing
disease surveillance in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, NIOSH has crippled its ca-
pability for allocation of resources in a manner consistent with sound public health
principles. Only top-level management in NIOSH can fix that dilemma; anything
less than a fix would mean the loss of an irreplaceable opportunity to realign the
sector initiatives in keeping with the original congressional intent.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, the regional focus of the Ag Centers has produced
a diversity of approaches and issues and has been a strong suit of the AFF Program
(see Table 6-1).
The committee reviewed copious documentation of peer-reviewed publica-
tions capable of rendering programmatic advice, and it is unclear whether such
activity affected the direction of the AFF Program. NIOSH has used internal re-
view mechanisms through the National Occupational Research Agenda that have
resulted in program redirection. Other external reviews include a commission
chaired by Susan Kennedy that issued a seminal report in 1995 calling for program
adjustment in both the intramural and extramural venues (Kennedy, 1995). Cyclic
review, through external peer-review mechanisms, has been applied repeatedly to
the extramurally funded Ag Centers, childhood agricultural injury initiatives, other
R01 initiatives, and the NIOSH Education and Research Centers (ERCs). Such re-
view has resulted in some redirection of program effort, including discontinuation
of funding of some extramural partners.
Evidence presented to the committee suggests that NIOSH-sponsored AFF
research has typically used quality-assurance procedures for surveillance activity,
basic laboratory science, and intervention research. The exception of which the
committee is aware involved the six state-level Farm Family Health and Hazard
Surveillance projects funded in the first 5 years of AFF Program effort. Created