61 Dale Mitchell – Oregon’s pesticide incidence reporting system

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Dale Mitchell on PolliNation with Andony Melathopoulos

Beginning in 2013, Oregon faced a series of bumble bee poisoning incidences associated with pesticide use on linden trees. In response, the Oregon Legislature passed the Avoidance of Adverse Effects on Pollinating Insects bill. A key provision of this legislation was for Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) to develop a bee incidence reporting system to facilitate public reporting of incidences related to pollinator health. This week we hear about how this reporting system works from Dale Manager, a Program Manager with ODA’s Pesticide section. This week’s guest host is Oregon Bee Project’s Steering Committee member and ODA’s Pesticide Registration and Certification Specialist Gilbert Uribe.

Listen in to this episode to learn how the Department of Agriculture handles suspected pesticide-related bee incidents, and what they do to prevent them.

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“I would like to encourage any citizens within the state of Oregon to report any suspected bee related incident. That information is valuable to the department and others involved in evaluating pollinator health.” – Dale Mitchell

Show Notes:

  • When Dale got started in the Department of Agriculture’s pesticide division
  • What steps are taken in a normal bee kill investigation
  • How the investigative process changes under different conditions
  • What separates the bee kill investigations from their normal procedures
  • How the Department of Agriculture enforces their rules and regulations
  • How the ODA’s process compares to those of other states
  • Why Oregon’s data collection follows a national guideline
  • What changed since the Wilsonville bee incident
  • Why the Wilsonville incident gained so much public awareness

“Bee or pollinator concerns is only one type of investigative activity that we follow up on, but the process is really a fact finding process.” – Dale Mitchell

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One thought on “61 Dale Mitchell – Oregon’s pesticide incidence reporting system”

  1. Our exposure data were also based on self-reports and lacked pesticide-specific information on intensity or duration of exposure, and thus prone to misclassification. Because pesticide information was collected before diagnosis, misclassification of outcome and exposure was likely non-differential and would tend to attenuate measures of association ( Blair et al., 2011 ). Pesticide self-reports were found to be reliable in the AHS applicators ( Blair et al., 2011 ; Hoppin et al., 2002 ) but we do not have data to support this for their spouses. Still, it is likely that self-reports by farm spouses are more reliable than those in the general population due to greater familiarity with and reliance on pesticides. Exposure misclassification may also have occurred because we only considered pesticide use before enrollment, and did not account for pesticide use that occurred later; we are uncertain about the direction of any resulting bias. Participants may also have been exposed to pesticides indirectly via their applicator spouses as well as from other environmental sources that we did not account for, for example, if they lived near other farms. Further, participants were exposed to multiple pesticides, and our single pollutant models, though they adjust for correlated pesticides, do not address joint effect of exposure to pesticide mixtures or how these pesticides interact. These should be explored in future studies, although finding suitable statistical methods accommodating the complex exposure scenarios in the AHS is challenging.

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