The authors recruited 173 men, ages 60 to 74, from 670 diagnosed with prostate cancer in Tulare, Fresno and Kern counties, according to the state's cancer registry. They used Medicare and tax records to find 162 men ages 65 and older without prostate cancer to use as a control group.
They traced where the men lived and worked from 1974 to 1999, and compared those locations with state records of pesticide use. They found prostate cancer more prevalent among men who lived near areas sprayed with methyl bromide, captan and eight organochlorine pesticides.
Greenspace spoke with one of the study's authors, Myles Cockburn, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, about the implications.
Q: Why did you look at these particular pesticides?
A: We had to isolate particular pesticides to determine causality. So we started with things that we had some lab-based evidence that they might lead to prostate cancer. There had to be biological plausibility.
Q: How could you be sure these people were exposed in their neighborhoods, not agricultural or other jobs?
A: We asked them if they worked in farming occupations, and our control group was a random selection from the [Central] Valley, and only about 3% worked in agriculture.
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