Agricultural workers in the U.S. are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related stress than people working in any other field.
It was 7 p.m. on June 24, only the third official day of summer, and the temperature was still a scorching 99 degrees. Emma Cortes, a global emergency medicine fellow at Brown University and founder of the Migrant Health Collaborative of South Jersey, a nonprofit working to expand health care access for the state’s migrant farmworkers, was delivering hygiene kits to several worker camps in the area.
She met up with Jose Eduardo Sandoval Herrera, a migrant farmworker from Mexico who has spent the past 12 summers working in New Jersey.
“The heat is a bit strong and sometimes you feel like you’re suffocating because the sun is so strong,” said Herrera.
He said that just days earlier, a worker on the farm from Haiti had been rushed to the hospital due to heat stroke.
At the time, Herrera was packing blueberries at a warehouse in the small town of Hammonton, New Jersey. Unfortunately, the air conditioning at the warehouse offered little relief to the workers. And even worse, the housing provided by their employer had no AC at all.
“So if there is no equipment to keep the houses cool, obviously you are not going to perform at work,” he explained. “Because you can’t even sleep, you won’t rest well. And the next day even your strength is gone because of the heat.”
But it’s not just their work performance that can suffer, heat can have a heavy impact on a farmworker’s health.
This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. Listen to the full episode on Protecting the People Who Grow Our Food
Read more at WHYY