Review of Outreach Activities: Knowledge Diffusion and Technology Transfer - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 120

versity. It focuses on ergonomics, pesticide exposure and health effects assessment,
acute unintentional injury, virtual-reality simulation of hazardous agricultural jobs,
and agricultural safety and health education and outreach. Although it is only 5 years
old, the center focused heavily on ROPS, protection from sun and heat, and grain
engulfment. It has provided some training, a ROPS video, fact sheets, hazard alerts,
and grain-bin safety standards but little r2p programming. An interesting research
project, related to the New York Study described in the next section, is evaluating
the use of hazard audits for insurance companies; there are no results yet.
Northeast Center for Agricultural and Occupational Health
The Northeast Center for Agricultural and Occupational Health (NEC, http://
www.nycamh.com ) is at the New York Center for Agricultural Medicine and Health
(NYCAMH) in Fly Creek, NY. NEC serves a 13-state region from Maine to Virginia.
The center focused on tractor accidents and injuries to migrants and children, with
Advisory Board input in selecting high-priority issues. The focus was primarily on
musculoskeletal injuries, hearing loss, and other ergonomic injuries. The center
provided considerable outreach and knowledge transfer, including the newly devel-
oped ergonomic apple bag for migrant workers, the ROPS program, and extensive
safety training and health screening. But about 52 percent of tractors on the farms
that produce the top five New York commodities have no ROPS.
The committee noted Goal 5 of NEC: “Carefully evaluate all education and
prevention projects.” However, evaluation seems to focus on the use of materials
rather than outcomes in reduction in injuries and mortality (page 391 of Appen-
dix 2-10 in NIOSH, 2006a).
Although most evaluation studies focus on use of materials rather than out-
comes, one exception is the North American Guidelines for Children's Agricultural
Tasks (NAGCAT) interventions study. In this project, the valuation compared
intervention versus control farms and demonstrated a significantly longer time
to occurrence of injuries after the intervention was provided (pages 407-501 in
NIOSH, 2006a). Another discovery is that only about half the recorded injuries
were in NAGCAT-covered categories; this result was explained by the fact that about
half the accidents involving children occurred on farms but not during work, and
it has resulted in NAGCAT reports on safe play areas on farms.
A second successful program is the Agricultural Hazard Assessment and Train-
ing program, in which insurance claims declined from 90 to 50; losses in costs were
also reduced over the 4 years of intervention on the 50 farms in the NY Study. The
severity of injuries was also lower than on the control farms. The insurance com-
pany now uses risk assessment instruments in three other states (pages 410-501
in NIOSH, 2006a).