Health Needs of Seasonal Farmworkers and Their Families

T HE past 10 or even 20 years have brought few improvements in lives of migrant farmworkers and their families. A Public Health Service report of 20 years ago and a 1960 report from California describe same lack of health care for nearly a million U.S. citizens. In 1940, situation was summarized in these words. effect of transients on community health is to increase hazard of ill health to residents and to raise incidence of most of communicable diseases. This results chiefly from fact that transients are not given equal consideration in community programs of sanitation, preventive medicine, and isolation of infectious cases of communicable disease (1). Eleven years later a Colorado physician remarked: We know that communicable diseases are present among migrants. The fatalistic acceptance of situation, plus their poverty, makes problem of medical care a critical (2). And a Florida observer commented: Many of older ones just accept sickness as part of life, just as they do being out of work or living in a shack (3). The California reports in 1960 summed it up as the almost complete nonavailability of medical care and inadequacy of preventive services available to this group of workers (4). Another California study indicated that about one out of five adults among itinerant farm laborers included in a recent study by State vocational rehabilitation service had some kind of disability (5). Half of these disabled adults suffered seriously reduced earning capacity. The report concludes: Due to their standard of living, they are . . . apt to have serious unresolved health problems and major disability.