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Background: This paper provides background and a process description for a national initiative ('Safe Farmer Common Sense') on prevention of occupational injuries in Swedish agriculture.Methods: This initiative, which received investment funding of 65 million SEK (6.5 million USD) from the European Union (EU) over the 5-year period 2009-2013, was jointly developed by researchers, agricultural organizations, authorities, and politicians. The program had a farmer-centered perspective and included short courses, on-farm visits by supervisors, and a number of education events and awareness-promoting activities.Results: Our analysis showed that the concept was successful, since it involved farmers to a greater extent and prompted a high proportion of these to introduce injury prevention measures on their farms compared with a control group. The analysis also confirmed that these activities continued two-three years after participation in the program.Conclusion: The program was not found to have any major effect on the number of occupational injuries, although the level of occupational fatalities was lower during the intervention period. Thus the investment can be questioned as regards the limited impact on the number of work-related injuries in Swedish agriculture and may have been too short to have a lasting effect.

OBJECTIVE: The Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety (WCAHS) at the University of California, Davis implemented a multifaceted rapid response to COVID-19 in the western United States. This paper describes the center's response from mid-March through June 30, 2020. METHODS: A comprehensive needs assessment was conducted with agricultural stakeholders. Agriculture-specific COVID-19 resources were developed and disseminated, and a farmer/employer survey was launched. RESULTS: The WCAHS COVID-19 resources web page, worksite checklist, and training guide were shared on over 50 web pages nationally. As of June 30, 2020, 282 online surveys have been received. Ongoing informal discussions with agricultural stakeholders indicate a disconnect between the experiences of farmers/employers and farmworkers in relation to COVID-19 prevention at the worksite. Initial survey responses indicate that implementing social distancing is one of the greatest challenges at the worksite. Confusion over local, state, and federal guidelines and which to follow is another concern. CONCLUSION: The WCAHS response to COVID-19, in close collaboration with agricultural stakeholders, represents a useful model for a rapid response to a public health crisis by regional centers. Key elements to its success include rapid personalized communication with a wide range of agricultural stakeholders, an actively engaged External Advisory Board, the development of industry-specific resources and information, recurring and iterative engagement with stakeholders as new COVID-19 information emerged and resources were developed, and the identification of the unique gap WCAHS was positioned to fill. The multipronged dissemination approach enhanced the reach of WCAHS COVID-19 resources.

Social media use in public health and other health related research applications has seen a rapid increase in recent years. However, there has been very limited utilization of this growing digital sector in agricultural injury research. Social media offers immense potential in gathering informal data, both text and images, converting them into knowledge, which can open up avenues for research, policy, and practice. There are a number of ways social media data can be utilized in agricultural injury research. This paper touches on the adoption of these data sources in health research and discusses the use of social media as an exploratory research tool that can peer into and identify the edges of potential health and safety problems.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has been the lead federal agency of the national Childhood Agricultural Injury Prevention Initiative (CAIPI) since the program's inception in 1996 and in this role, collaborated with numerous partners in childhood agricultural injury prevention activities. This collaboration has likely helped achieve the current reduction in childhood agricultural injury. The paper looks at existing groups with past and current childhood agricultural injury prevention activities for partnering strategies that could contribute to reducing the morbidity and mortality of childhood agricultural injuries. Based upon the review, suggestions are made for future partnering strategies to continue progress in this area.

This paper reviews epidemiologic studies of cancer among agricultural populations to identify possible associations and to provide a focus for future investigations. Meta-analyses of mortality surveys of farmers find excesses of several cancers, including connective tissue, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin disease, and multiple myeloma and cancers of the skin, stomach and brain and deficits for total mortality, heart disease, total cancer, and cancers of the esophagus, colon, lung and bladder. Meta-analyses of studies of individual cancers also support these findings indicating a need to identify exposures and lifestyle factors that might account for this mortality pattern. Although cancer studies of other occupations that might have pesticide exposures in common with farmers show some similarities with observations among farmers, the overall patterns are quite different. This suggests that pesticides are not likely to fully explain the cancer and other disease patterns observed among farmers. Because exposures vary by type of farm operation, exposures for individual farmers can differ considerably. Studies in the future need to focus on the full range of exposures to fully understand the cancer pattern in farmers.