Recommendations for Program Improvement - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 186

conduct targeted surveillance of youthful workers, adult owners and operators,
and agricultural employees. The committee received numerous written comments
from the public that specifically mentioned the primary need for a comprehensive
surveillance system.
The AFF workforce continues to change rapidly in the following ways: a decline
in self-employed and unpaid family workers; an increase in regular or year-round
hired farm workers from 712,715 in 1974 to 927,708 in 2002 (U.S. Department
of Commerce, 1977; USDA, 2002a); an increase in reliance on contract labor and
farm-management firms; and marked shifts in demographics among hired and con-
tract workers, such as Africans in the fishing industry in Alaska, Mayan-speaking
Guatemaltecos in New York state dairies, and indigenous immigrants throughout
the nation. The committee strongly urges NIOSH to update and broaden its under-
standing of hired workers to include—without regard to immigration status or
ethnicity—all hired AFF laborers, such as confined livestock, fishing vessel, fish
farm, and forestry fire abatement workers. New approaches to surveillance may be
necessary to explore and could include more orientation toward regional surveil-
lance and more involvement with local and state health departments. Expanding
on existing expertise with the state-based Fatality Assessment and Control Evalu-
ation (FACE) programs to incorporate disease surveillance provides an avenue to
become more comprehensive in the surveillance approach.
Additionally, there is little evidence that AFF Program staff have considered
workplace injury and illness in H-2A workers. That is an important topic in the
context of the policy debate regarding immigration reform and the Agricultural
Jobs congressional proposal advocated by both AFF employers and workers' unions.
Involving other federal, state, and local agencies in the discussion of expanded
surveillance, which includes temporary workers, would begin to address this gap.
NIOSH must demonstrate greater willingness to use results of surveillance by
its partners, including the CDC Injury Center, the regional Ag Centers, the Na-
tional Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, agricultural
safety specialists in the nation's land-grant institutions, equipment manufacturers,
and other organizations representing agriculture, fishing, or forestry workers and
employers groups. NIOSH should evaluate opportunities to use National Agricul-
tural Statistics Services, the National Animal Health Monitoring System, and other
existing programs for surveillance purposes.
The committee has concluded that NIOSH should:
1. Conduct research on the potential use of both ongoing and non-routine
surveillance systems to identify priority topics for future research or intervention.
A focus on hazard surveillance, sentinel health and injury events, and occupational
illness outbreak investigations similar to the FACE investigations may be more
cost-effective than the current piecemeal approach.