By the time the girl arrived at the local emergency room, she was near death. She recovered eventually. Somebody had parked a tractor with pesticide material on it right in front of the play area, said Michael O Malley, the author of the report and a physician at the University of California, Davis.
Most pesticides used today are acutely toxic to humans.
Pesticides cause poisonings and deaths every year and are responsible for about one out of every sixteen calls to poison control centers. Acute Impacts Acute pesticide poisonings frequently involve organophosphate pesticides, or sometimes their close relatives, the n-methyl carbamates. The result is that certain nerve impulses are over-expressed, resulting in an array of acute toxic symptoms. Symptoms of organophosphate or carbamate poisoning include blurred vision, salivation, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, wheezing, and sometimes seizures, coma, and death. Mild to moderate pesticide poisoning mimics gastroenteritis, bronchitis, or intrinsic asthma, and even astute clinicians may not link these symptoms to pesticides.