Occupational Health in Agriculture: a historical glance

Unlike manual workers, in ancient populations farmers were highly respected and protected, since they served an essential role in society as food producers. In Rome, for example, there were hospitals in farms, where sick rural workers were taken on by specialized physicians. During the Middle Ages, although rural work was further reconsidered (monks and physicians commonly used medical herbs), epidemics, famines and wars, that periodically ravaged the fields, led farmers to leave the countryside and to move into urban centres. At the beginning of the 18th century, Bernardino Ramazzini (1633-1714) listed with accuracy the diseases suffered by the farmers (diarrhea, jaundice, malaria, pneumonia, etc.) and first recognized that they were caused by poor nutrition and bad living conditions (De Morbis Artificum”, 39). Infectious diseases were very common in rural population, in particular the smallpox. Interestingly, the vaccine against this condition was developed by the British physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823), just observing of the protective effects due to an occupational disease, the cowpox of the milkmaids. The vaccination of the rural workers against the smallpox, systematically practiced during the 19th century, may be considered as one of the first effective preventive measures towards a [biological] occupational risk. Subsequently, the improvement of the nutritional levels against vitamin deficiency, pellagra and endemic goiter, the draining of marshes against malaria, and the “industrialization” of the work in the fields contributed to increase farmer’s health conditions. These achievements led to the conclusion that agriculture was less dangerous than work in factories thus underestimating the risk and hence delaying the acknowledgment of some occupational diseases in this sector. In the last decades the introduction of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, mainly in the developing countries, and the identification of new biological agents are key factors to continue the research and improve occupational health conditions in agriculture.