Coping with exposure to toxic substances at work: the utopia of ergotoxicology according to Alain Garrigou^d

Abstract

Ergotoxicology is a discipline, a specialty of ergonomics focused on understanding situations in which workers are exposed to dangerous products. It is also a technology that seeks to design work situations in order to reduce or eliminate the exposures they experience. The research carried out and/or coordinated by Alain Garrigou, in various sectors such as agriculture, industry, nuclear production, among others, has contributed to: expanding the notion of exposure in order to consider the active role of workers in preventing and preserving their health; the development of research methods co-elaboreted with the participants and the community involved; the application of design methods and participation in work situations and equipment design. In addition, the knowledge produced serves to influence the social debate and, consequently, public actions and policies aimed at preventing and protecting the health of workers, especially in the face of pesticide use.

Occupational Health; Ergonomics; Action Research; Exposure; Prevention; Pesticides

Resumo

A ergotoxicologia é uma disciplina que é a especialidade da ergonomia voltada à compreensão das situações de exposição a produtos perigosos por trabalhadores e trabalhadoras. Constitui-se também como uma tecnologia que busca transformar as situações de trabalho para reduzir ou eliminar as exposições por eles vivenciadas. As pesquisas realizadas e/ou coordenadas por Alain Garrigou, em diversos setores como a agricultura, a indústria e a produção nuclear, têm contribuído para: expandir a noção de exposição a fim de considerar o papel ativo dos trabalhadores na prevenção e preservação de sua saúde; o desenvolvimento de métodos de investigação co-construídos com os participantes e comunidade envolvida; a aplicação de métodos de projeto e de participação na concepção de situações de trabalho e equipamentos. Além disso, os conhecimentos produzidos servem para influenciar o debate social e, consequentemente, as ações e políticas públicas voltadas à prevenção e à proteção da saúde dos trabalhadores e trabalhadoras, em especial no enfrentamento ao uso dos agrotóxicos.

Saúde do Trabalhador; Ergonomia; Pesquisa-ação; Exposição; Prevenção; Agrotóxicos

Interviewer: How did you get from ergonomics to ergotoxicology? How would you characterize these disciplines?

Alain Garrigou: I’m going to try to give you some of the history of ergotoxicology, how I was able to experience it and situate it initially in the French and then international landscape, relating it to occupational health issues. First, we need to define both ergonomics and ergotoxicology, which is not a new discipline. It is a specialization of ergonomics, like computer ergonomics, ergonomic project management, or architectural ergonomics. For me, first of all, ergonomics is a scientific discipline, among the labor sciences, which produces knowledge, models, and methodologies, taking as its object human engagement at work and its ability to meet both production objectives and its relationship with health.

Secondly, an important specificity of the discipline is that ergonomics is a technology, i.e. it is committed to transforming work situations in order to maintain performance and health at work or health at work and performance. We go beyond knowledge, we produce knowledge to transform, following the legacy of ergonomics left by Alain Wisner, Antoine Laville, Catherine Teiger, François Guérin, Jacques Durafourg, among others.

Thirdly, for me, ergonomics is a form of utopia, in other words, maintaining health and performance or performance and health is not a matter of course. There are a number of situations in which ergonomics have overcome models of productivist rationality in order to preserve health. However, a change in the factory or slaughterhouse management was all it took for the gains to be lost shortly after the ergonomic action. There are a number of projects in which we didn’t win the battle of real work^e, failing to get people to build their health at work. As Christophe Dejours postulated, the labor sciences, including ergonomics, have lost the battle of work in the face of profound transformations in the different forms of work in recent years.

For me, in this scenario, the question of utopia resonates. According to Valérie Puyo², ergonomics is a utopia to be realized and worked on continuously, although it is little discussed in our professional community.

What I have just said is valid for ergonomics in any of its specialties and therefore applies to ergotoxicology, which produces knowledge as a discipline or sub-discipline on exposure issues and seeks to explain them and their potential effects on health. The notion of exposure is therefore central to ergotoxicology, which is also a technology that seeks to redesign work situations in order to reduce or eliminate exposures³.

We act according to the classic principles of prevention, according to which we must first eliminate the danger at source, when there are residual risks; then we must implement collective protections; and then, if this is not possible, we must act at the individual level.

Faced with the impacts on the environment and occupational health, the notion of utopia also arises for ergotoxicology. Can we completely eliminate exposure to dangerous products? That’s a big debate. If we take the example of pesticides, we can’t currently eliminate exposure, we can even reduce it, but it would be utopian to think that the French or global agricultural system can do without pesticides in the short term. Only in very specific contexts is it possible to produce without pesticides.

As you can see from its name, this is a multidisciplinary venture that mobilizes two central elements: work and toxicology. To do this, it is necessary to work with toxicologists, medical toxicologists or sanitarians, professionals and researchers from the fields of anthropology, psychology, and physiology of work.

Take the case of the level of physical activity which, if added to the levels of exposure, increases the effects of contamination. This means that each project depends on a specific multidisciplinary organization. When working on the problem of pesticides, specialists in agriculture or agroecology may be called in. When dealing with nanomaterials, we are more concerned with industrial toxicology. Therefore, ergotoxicology is built (and has been built) on a specific and situated network of actors.

Interviewer 2: What were the reasons that led you to develop ergotoxicology? What were the initial problems?

Alain Garrigou: I must start with this: I didn’t create ergotoxicology, I continued the work that had started before me, from 1984-1985. In particular, I really must highlight Robert Villatte, a chemical trade unionist who had been surprised by illnesses affecting workers in the chemical industry. From the mid-1980s, he questioned the limits of toxicology and became one of the pioneers of the discipline. In the 1985 book “Les Risques du Travail”, he wrote a chapter in which he set out the challenges for the development of ergotoxicology⁴.

Another person who worked on these issues, but did not develop them further, was Nicole Devolvé, who published an article in 1984 called “Ergonomics and Toxicology” in the journal Travail Humain⁵. The author was a pioneer in questioning these aspects. Laerte Sznelwar, whose thesis was defended in 1992, addressing issues of ergotoxicology in agriculture, is the third name to highlight. He was interested in the comparative exposure of farmers in horticulture in Brazil and, at the same time, in the region of Orléans⁶. The approach I was able to develop is part of this movement, which began at the Laboratoire d’Ergonomie des Systèmes Complexes in 1997, under the direction of François Danielou, at the Université de Bordeaux 2. At the request of the Organisme professionnel de prévention du bâtiment et des travaux publics^f (OPP-BTP) at the time of the ban on the use of asbestos, I took part in research with the doctor Mohamed Brahim to intervene in asbestos removal work situations in different locations⁷. It was my first job in the field of ergotoxicology.

In 1998, I took up my academic activities in the Department of Hygiene, Safety and Environment at the Institut Universitaire Technologique (IUT) at the University of Bordeaux. As I couldn’t continue with the ergonomics projects^g, I approached the Health, Work and Environment Laboratory, directed at the time by Patrick Brochard, who had worked on asbestos.

It was in this laboratory that I met Isabelle Baldi. We started collaborating, initially in a modest way, by offering internships at the IUT in research projects on exposure to pesticides. Little by little, I became involved in health and work research, focusing on farmers and their exposure to pesticides.

When Bordeaux I, Bordeaux II and Bordeaux IV universities formed the Université de Bordeaux, the laboratory became the Epidémiologie du Cancer et Expositions Environnementales (Epicene) team^h of the Research Center of the Institut National de Santé et Recherche Médicale (Inserm)ⁱ, of the University of Bordeaux.

It was within this team, led initially by Simone Mathoulin, then by Isabelle Baldi, that I was able to continue to develop the issue of ergotoxicology, associated with exposure to pesticides, and to investigate exposure to ultrafine particles, including nanometric ones, problems addressed to the Laboratory at the time, and later to the Epicene research team.

Interviewer: One of the aspects that seems important to me is that ergotoxicology, unlike the analysis of work that was practiced at the time, emphasized the need for measures. However, in the scholar and professional debate, there were positions against use of measures, especially when it came to dealing with repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) in France. How can measures be integrated into activity analysis? What were the challenges and problems to be overcome and how was this resolved?

Alain Garrigou: In fact, the question of measurement in activity ergonomics has always been the subject of debate, with some colleagues opposing measurements in general, or accepting only measurements of the frequency of the action performed or the cumulative duration of these actions, ascertained from the analysis of the activity. For me, the latter were already observable measures of the activity, in terms of duration and frequency^j.

When I met colleagues in occupational health and environmental health, for whom the issue of measurement and its different modalities was a common practice, when I collaborated with Nicole Vezina in Quebec on the issue of RSI/WMSD, and when I trained young prevention technicians at the IUT to analyze occupational risks, I was led to review the issue of measurement and to look for ways of integrating it into the analysis of activity, as was done in ergonomics. In other words, categories of action are defined; within them, observable variables associated with each category are identified and knowing that within each category these variables can interrupt each other, it is necessary to measure the frequency and duration of each of them for each category of action. This methodological perspective was developed in the book “Comprendre le travail pour le transformer”¹⁰. At the time, Alain Kerguelen developed a software adapted for activity analysis, which gave rise to Kronos and other subsequent developments.

From Kronos’ base, a company working for the Institut National de Recherche et de Sécurité (INRS)^k, developed the new Captive software in a project funded by INRS. After INRS withdrew from the project, it has been marketed by the company to date. Captive’s advantage over what Kronos provided at the time is the possibility of integrating up to four encoded videos in parallel, as well as several captors, providing real-time information on heart rate, concentration of volatile organic compounds, concentration of ultrafine, micrometric or nanometric particles, etc. There are different measurement devices that can be integrated with Captive.

As it seemed interesting to me, I bought this software, started testing the prototypes, even funding modifications for particular applications, and we set up field exercises in real work situations with students to master the method and the software’s functionalities. This became essential because, combined with video image analysis and activity analysis, it allowed us to produce boundary objects for prevention, involving doctors, prevention professionals, workers, trade unionists, and company managers. Through these objects, it became possible to visualize exposures that were not directly visible, which constituted an enigma, and when used in a situation of self-confrontation¹¹, in particular, proved to be a particularly interesting tool. From the methodological developments proposed by Nathalie Judon, Louis Galey, Fabienne Goutille, Caroline Jolly, and Marion Albert, we have arrived at an engineering of boundary objects for prevention, which makes it possible to reveal exposures and build prevention strategies and constitutes a major contribution of our approach. From this perspective, we are not looking for measurement for measurement’s sake. It is the integrated measure of the description of the activity, recorded in video images, which allows us to code this activity in parallel.

Interviewer: You’ve coordinated several studies and carried out a lot of research: could you give an overview of the main research you’ve carried out, the objects dealt with, the conceptual and methodological contributions, and the resulting technological development?

Alain Garrigou: There are several elements to point out. Between 2000 and 2010, we were confronted with a conundrum related to the exposure of winegrowers to pesticides. In the study coordinated by Isabelle Baldi, called Pesticides Exposition^l (Pestexpo)¹², we took the perspective of uncontrolled studies. There are two opposing currents on the issue of pesticides. Controlled studies, usually carried out by industry, which impose ways of working on farmers, the protective equipment that must be used and, of course, indicate lower levels of exposure than uncontrolled studies. In this way, they favor the formal authorization of the introduction of certain products onto the market.

In contrast, we carry out uncontrolled field studies, i.e. we start with what people do, the activities they carry out and the protections they use or don’t use.

In the Pestexpo study in the mid-2000s, the results of which were published between 2006 and 2008, we compared the level of contamination of Folpel, a product used against fungi that affects vineyards. We compared the level of exposure between workers wearing protective clothing and workers who were not protected during the phases of preparing the pesticide mixture [dilution], application and cleaning [of the application equipment - sprayers].

During these three phases, approximately 200 different exposure measurements were taken. Using a patch technique, which is glued to the skin, we observed a large number of products. If the worker is not wearing protection, the patch is (exposed) outdoors. If the worker is wearing protection, the patch is under protection. Three types of results were found: The first was a variation in contamination levels. In some cases, people were only slightly contaminated, in other cases quite contaminated, without us necessarily being able to understand why. This corresponded to a first line of reasoning, and meant that the data was not presented in averages, but in geometric distributions, in particular medians

The second is the fact that, during the syrup preparation phase, workers wearing protection had a level of contamination comparable, on average, to unprotected workers. This was something that surprised us. During the application phase, protected workers were twice as contaminated as unprotected workers, on average. In the end, during the sprayer cleaning phase, workers wearing protection could be three or four times more contaminated than unprotected workers, on average.

This seemed like an enigma to us, difficult to understand at the time, because we thought that wearing a shield prevented exposure, in other words, it protected. We checked to make sure we hadn’t inverted the samples, as this was a possibility, but we confirmed that they hadn’t been inverted. We started working on various hypotheses and, as part of the Laboratory team, my job was to develop methods for characterizing exposures according to the activity: here we come to the third result of our research. In the first hypothesis, it was considered that workers who wore protection, because they believed they were protected, might be less cautious than unprotected workers, especially in their movements when filling up [the application equipment] and, in particular, in the way they poured the powder [from the pesticide sprayer]; meanwhile, workers without protection were more aware of the risk of exposure and were much more meticulous in the way they moved the pesticide containers, poured the products and made the preparations [for application].

This hypothesis remains generally valid, but there is a second hypothesis, based on the question of the permeation of the clothing, which came to light after conversations with a pesticide manufacturer. It should be noted that the clothing available to farmers at the time, and still mostly today, was not designed to protect against pesticides used in agriculture. Although they were designed for the chemical industry, they were recommended to protect farmers using pesticides in powder or liquid form. That’s the first level. On the second level, what I discovered made me engage in a multidisciplinary and multi-technological relationship, trying to understand what was happening with the garments and what the protection criteria adopted were. Two themes emerged. The notion of penetration suggests that chemical products, including pesticides, can pass through imperfections in materials, whether gloves or clothing, depending on the imperfections, such as holes in the seams, when they are sewn and not glued, for example; this will make it easier for the pesticide to pass through the fabric and therefore the clothing. This is a relatively well-known issue. But there was another phenomenon that was much less well known, the phenomenon of permeation, the chemical reaction at the molecular level between the material that makes up the protective clothing and the product or products that make up the formulation of pesticides: the active ingredient, its adjuvants and all the substances that can be found in its composition. What quickly emerged is that, for the same garment, depending on the material or materials, its level of effectiveness and protection varies according to the pesticides, with permeations that could occur quickly, in less than 10 minutes, and others that could occur over a longer period of time, up to 8 hours, for example, after the garment has been exposed to the pesticides. What was revealed to me was that there was no generic garment that would protect against all chemical products or all pesticides. It was therefore necessary to address this issue on a case-by-case basis, in a dual relationship between the composition of the material of the clothing, usually polypropylene, and the substances found in the pesticide, as it is marketed. In this way, we discovered that a certain number of products can quickly pass through the garments.

A study by a pesticide manufacturer that tested a relatively thick PVC apron with 12 of these products found that eight of the 12 permeated in less than 10 minutes or less than 20 minutes through the garment. This allowed us to question the protective capacity of the equipment. We were thus able to explain why people wearing protection might be more exposed or contaminated than people not wearing protection. So, in the long term, what could this mean? Farmers reuse protective gear several times because it costs between 50 and 100 euros, depending on the equipment. Those recommended as disposable can be used by them all year round, even for several years. If we associate this practice with permeation, it means that products gradually accumulate inside material that makes up the protective clothing, through a phenomenon of absorption from the outside and desorption from the inside. The more pesticides are applied, the more protective clothing is used, and used for a long time, the phenomenon of permeation will generate an accumulation inside the clothing; this probably explains what was found in our analysis. It is therefore a very controversial issue in the community, “hot” for industry and state representatives. In view of this, we had to do a lot of work to alert the government departments responsible for assessing the effectiveness of protective equipment, particularly the General Directorate of Labor of the Ministry of Labor. Between 2007 and 2008, I had to write six versions of the alert, before arriving at the final version l^m, so that there would be specific controls and that, in fact, this hypothesis would be validated in the laboratory by the Agence française de sécurité sanitaire de ‘environnement et du travail (Afset)ⁿ, an institution that subsequently became the Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail (Anses)^o. Thus, these issues originating in the field were addressed to prevention institutions and, to some extent, to public policy actors. This led us to participate in debates, and even clash with industry representatives or researchers funded by industry.

Interviewer: These studies on exposure in viticulture were carried out before you qualified as a thesis supervisor - HDR¹⁴, in which you formalized the prospect of a research program on ergotoxicology. So, what have been the objects, orientations, studies carried out, and main results to date?

Alain Garrigou: Exactly. There was the work on pesticides, the study on exposure to styrene in boat manufacturing, the work that was done in the nuclear sector, on the exposure of mechanics to grease fumes, for example. There was a lot of work going on at the time (at the end of the 2010s). Between 2009 and 2010, I wrote my HDR thesis, defended in 2011, in which I tried to synthesize the knowledge produced as a result of my research journey, from my forays into design ergonomics to ergotoxicology, in order to define it, put forward a number of basic concepts and methodological developments, starting, in particular, with the integration of measurement¹⁴. This allowed me to set up a research program and start supervising thesis work to advance these developments. The first thesis on ergotoxicology was by Nathalie Judon, defended in 2017¹⁵. It dealt with road paving and the exposure of workers to bitumen vapor. In this thesis, funded by the INRS, Nathalie developed tools that integrated activity analysis, exposure measurement and individual and cross-sectional self-confrontations to address workers’ exposure and their awareness of it. Her work also made it possible to discuss aspects that took place in the private sphere of workers. Until then, in ergonomics, as we focused on the professional sphere, we didn’t investigate the private sphere. Road construction workers exposed to bitumen didn’t protect themselves because it was too hot. I remember an amused Landes worker who said that when he got home every day, between 9 and 10 p.m. in the summer, his two children, aged four and six, were waiting for him, trying to grab him by the legs. He said: “What I do is avoid it as much as possible, because I know I can bring products home... and I have a second washing machine where I can wash my things, etc.” Even if it was thought that the workers had no specific knowledge or wisdom about labor protection, Nathalie’s work highlighted aspects of domestic life. This work was carried out in parallel with a large project, funded by the National Cancer Research Institute, where I coordinated a team of more than 20 people between 2012 and 2016, to investigate exposures in different sectors, such as agriculture, furniture manufacturing, solvent manufacturing, etc. In this project, this question arose. In the furniture factory, which was the subject of Fabienne Goutille’s intervention¹⁶, there was a lady who said that she came home very tired after a night shift and slept without washing; when her daughter woke up to go to school, she refused to cuddle her daughter for fear of passing on products that came from the factory.

This was followed by a thesis co-funded by the INRS and an Anses project, after being selected in a call for proposals. This is Louis Galey’s thesis¹⁷on workers’ exposure to nanometric particles found in the manufacture of technical rubber, or so-called additive manufacturing, in the aeronautics industry. The important thing about this work is that, until then, in ergotoxicology, we had developed methods and tools to characterize exposures but had done little to change work situations. We were able to work on changes to aspiration systems and personal protective equipment, but little on the design of work situations. Louis developed an integration method using Captive with real-time measurement sensors with ultrafine, micrometric and nanometric particles associated with the activity and, at the same time, recovered the essence of ergonomics methodology of design, using, in particular, characteristic action situations that allowed us to simulate future activities with the workers. He proposed the notion of a characteristic exposure situation that can be used in design processes to simulate possible exposures in the future and, I would say, arbitrate a certain number of choices. His work was really important; in particular, at one of Safran’s sites, it was possible to convince the top-level hierarchy of the importance of the methodology, which led, seven or eight years later, to the offer of a Cifre thesis^p being developed in the company. The first two theses, both by Nathalie Judon¹⁵and Louis Galey¹⁷, made a lot of progress on formalization, knowledge and methodologies. Three other theses were carried out almost at the same time. Caroline Jolly’s thesis¹⁸, which belonged to the IRSST, was co-supervised by Elise Ledoux, from the University of Quebec in Montreal, and me. She worked on the exposure to pesticides of workers in apple cultivation in Quebec, taking into account their status as heads of companies on small farms, to address the levels of compromise they could establish between exposure, crop guarantees and important economic choices. The work influenced the environment in Quebec on the issue of pesticides, questioning the perception of the use of these products and provoking the publication of a law on the recognition of diseases, in particular Parkinson’s and its association with exposure to pesticides, as well as other ongoing movements. Then there was the thesis by Fabienne Goutille¹⁹, an ethnology graduate who had been recruited to the Association for Research on Cancer (ARC) project in 2012 to act as project director at ARC. She discovered ergotoxicology between 2012 and 2016.

I then called on her for another project. A multidisciplinary thesis was developed, involving ergonomics and anthropology, somewhat in line with Caroline Jolie’s workin order to address farmers and their concerns, because, for them, exposure to pesticides or the health problems they cause is not the main issue. Today, in the face of climate change, their concern is to save their crops, save their economic model, transform their mode of production; sometimes they say they sacrifice themselves for the sake of their family in order to make their production viable. The interesting thing about Fabianne’s work was that her in-depth analysis allowed her to discover that all the farmers had a very accurate representation of the risks related to exposure. The specificity of the work is that the methodology was inspired by the work of Odonne in Italy in the 1970s, in particular by the idea of the Expanded Research Community, in which it was possible to associate workers and their representatives with research teams to define research objects and methodologies. It is usually the researchers who define the exposure measurement protocols. In Fabienne’s work, we presented our measurement tools, asked the farmers what they wanted us to do or what they wanted to learn and could reproduce. That’s what happened. I remember a moment when a mother of a family suddenly said that her interest was going to the garden, in front of the farm, to check if whether where her children were playing was contaminated or not. So, they started taking exposure measurements; we even transferred methodological elements in the case of a Chateau^q in Pessac, where these questions were raised in the face of pressure from the neighborhood. We were in the process of jointly constructing the exposure measure with the actors. This is the strength of Fabienne’s thesis.

The thesis^r by Marion Albert²⁰showed that, in most cases, the determinants of exposure stem from decisions that were not the farmer’s responsibility, i.e. due to design problems, problems of integration between equipment, in which the farmer had nothing to do or choose

Marion Albert illustrates, as an example, the case of a sprayer with recovery panels to limit environmental pollution. In this way, the treated vine is trapped between the two panels which, located face to face, capture and collect the aerosols so that they are not dispersed by the wind; they are collected on the front plate, run off and reinjected into the tank. An interesting solution from an environmental point of view. However, in this project, the farmer had to pass between the panels in order to add fuel, gain access, and make some adjustments, and even if he was wearing clothing, he would get completely wet with pesticide.

This showed that various choices made by the designers, as well as the materialized result of a lack of integration in the design, were macro-determinants of exposure over which the workers had very little room for action. She carried out three levels of analysis. At the first level, she carried out an analysis based on the activity of farmers using sprayers and based on exposure measurements. At the second level, she sought out three sprayer manufacturers; she worked more closely with one of them, conducting interviews with the designers and those responsible for the projects; she sought to find out how the designers integrated information on the use of the equipment into the project. Her diagnosis showed that use was not taken into account, as well as insufficient use of standards, since designers only used them partially, and not all of them. At the third level of analysis, she looked at the formulators of the standards that are imposed on manufacturers. The hypothesis she defended in her thesis is that exposure is due to an overlap determinants: from the elements found in the work situation, to the choices made by the equipment designers and the actors in the regulatory process. Exposure was approached as the result of a series of micro, meso- and macro-determinants

Interviewer: After all this research, what are the main conceptual and methodological contributions that ergotoxicology has made to ergonomics and the work and health sciences?

Alain Garrigou: I think ergotoxicology’s greatest contribution lies in the notion of exposure. In the case of public health or toxicology, exposure results from a worker’s contact with a source of chemical emissions; contact with this source of emissions favors contamination of the worker. But these disciplines don’t ask what role the worker plays in the exposure situations they experience. There are exposure situations in which the worker will be exposed to a product without knowing it, and so, in effect, their role can be passive in relation to this exposure. This is the dominant model that we will find in the field of public health. But there are two other types of exposure situations to consider. What we have shown, if we consider the case of farmers exposed to pesticides, is that most of the time farmers are aware of the risk of exposure, they perceive it through smells, through coughing, in their body, on their skin, they experience exposure. Some wives told us that in the summer, even if they had showered after work, if their husband started sweating at night, they were able to detect the smells of the products coming off their bodies and tell what their husband had done during the day. These questions show that workers in agriculture, but not only in this sector, as it takes place in industry, have a perception of exposure, the influence of which materializes in their bodies. We can therefore consider three levels of exposure situations. At the first level, the worker may be exposed without knowing it. At the second level, the worker realizes that they are exposed and continues to expose themselves. What comes to light, and these are points that we continue to work on, are the strategies used by workers, within the margin of action available to them in various exposure situations, and the knowledge they have to avoid them²¹. In addition, what we see more precisely are the contradictions that exist, and the compromises perceived by workers in these circumstances. They put it this way: “I have my job, I do my job to meet the demands of production; I expose myself because sometimes I don’t have any other choice, or because another alternative would waste a lot of time, or the material isn’t suitable, etc.”.

There is a third level of exposure, in which an exposed worker becomes a source of exposure for others, i.e. they will become a source of exposure in their work and family environment, if they go home wearing contaminated clothes. This is the first contribution in terms of knowledge documented in the studies I’ve mentioned. In addition to this, our research does not end with the activities that involve exposure, but focuses on the preservation activities carried out by workers. In other words, because they have fallen ill or because they know people around them who have fallen ill, workers carry out both exposure prevention and health preservation activities. The two intersect. Although preserving their health allows them to carry out protective activities, this doesn’t necessarily happen in the other direction. The activity of preserving health requires a connection with the body itself: the sensitive body can tell you, at some point, that the worker’s preservation activity is not effective. These experiences call up the categories proposed by Yves Schwarz, about the use of oneself for oneself or the use of oneself for others. In this way, the workers ask themselves: “Do I accept, at some point, putting my preservation activity in danger?” “What is the commitment I make between preservation activity and protection activity?” These elements, which have been little discussed in the ergonomics of activity, seem to me to be an important contribution of ergotoxicology.

The last point I would like to stress concerns the design of work spaces and systems, i.e. how it would be possible to simulate future activities, integrating future exposures to hazards from different sources, especially considering situations of multiple exposure. One has to wonder how, at work, workers are exposed to various chemical products, i.e. a form of multi-exposure. But that’s not all, as they may be exposed to hazards from different sources. For example, physical exertion increases the heart rate and respiratory rate, which favors greater absorption of chemicals by the body. The occurrence of RSI/WMSD in nautical industry workers showed us that workers exposed to styrene developed RSI/WMSD more significantly, because styrene affects the synovial ganglion of the tendons, adding to the effects caused by repetitive work. The biggest challenge is to characterize the situations of exposure and multi-exposure in order to recognize the diseases; there is also an important challenge in terms of the need to characterize future exposures in order to be able to arbitrate or instruct project choices that are more favorable to protecting workers’ health. Following on Marion Albert’s work, in a project funded by a public call for proposals that include sprayer manufacturers, we will be proposing a prototype of application equipment in the form of virtual reality. We contributed the scenarios for using the sprayer and the situations of exposure to pesticides and based on the designers’ choices we intend to carry out simulations with the participation of farmers. In this way, considering the logic of using the equipment in the activity and that of the exposures, we can influence the design decisions.

Interviewer: I’d like to know how you see the relationship between science, the production of knowledge and public policies, after your long experience of practicing ergotoxicology? This is a very important aspect for the scientific world, but also for the discipline of ergonomics, which has historically been concerned with producing knowledge for intervention, for improving working conditions.

Alain Garrigou: The first thing I’d like to raise is how public policy actors have appropriated the contributions of ergotoxicology.

It should be known that the warning about the lack of protection or insufficient or relative protection of protective equipment against exposure to pesticides was passed on to the Ministry of Labor and AFSET, Anses today, making visible the work done in Bordeaux, knowing that this work was already recognized for its solid scientific basis in epidemiology, following the work of Isabelle Baldi and Pierre Lebailly. In 2012, ANSES decided to create a group of international experts to characterize pesticide exposure among agricultural workers. The group’s work was coordinated by Catherine Laurent, in the first transdisciplinary expertise at Anses, which lasted four years. We produced four volumes of reports. We did a bibliographical update on the issues of exposure and on the issue of worker protection, while the health effects were reviewed in parallel by an Inserm expertise. For me, this multidisciplinary, long-term work, in which we mobilized a lot, played an important role in changing the initial conception of the levels of determinants, and very clearly considering the political dimension^s in relation to pesticides, the political dimension related to the role of the knowledge already achieved in guiding public policies, whether health or agricultural policies. It was a process with very strong conflicts with two of the group’s researchers and with some Anses employees, as well as difficulties of an administrative nature. In the end, two reports with divergent perspectives were published after the intervention of the minister of labor at the time, Ségolène Royal, who had been requested through the group’s contacts.

At that point, even though I knew that the scientific knowledge produced about exposure and/or workers’ health would not be enough to change public policies, I can say that Anses appropriated the results of ergotoxicology.

I later joined a group on the recognition of occupational diseases. We prepared dossiers from a transdisciplinary perspective to submit to the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Agriculture, with the aim of recognizing occupational diseases among workers in all sectors of the economy. In another group of specialists, we work on the implementation of the National Health and Work Plan, which is fundamental for structuring public policy. There is a third space, the Working Conditions Guidance Council (COCT), an offshoot of the Ministry of Labor, where the social partners meet and define priorities on these issues. In this context, ergotoxicology offers answers to the questions posed by society that have been appropriated by public policy actors. To some extent, ergotoxicology is recognized for what it can do at a modest level. However, following the experience of the international expertise reported above, it is clear that science is not enough to guide public policy. When we look at the current climate warming situation, we see that warnings have been issued for more than 40 years but have been given little consideration. But what role could disciplines like ours, which produce situated knowledge, play in the work activity? Daniellou proposed a model of heterogeneous confrontation between the knowledge developed by ergonomics and knowledge obtained in specific environments, in order to produce less local and more general knowledge. This knowledge would be confronted with experimental scientific knowledge, mainly physiology, sleep physiology, cognitive psychology, etc. at the time²². This explains the difficulty ergonomics had at one time in influencing the public debate. In our experience with the issue of pesticides, it is essential to add that there is only a certain type of knowledge that influences technical-regulatory production, which is simplified knowledge. In the case of regulatory toxicology, various effects noted in reality and known to toxicologists are simplified, for example, the fact that only exposure limit values are considered to work for a single product, which does not apply in a multi-exposure situation. Although the scientific community in toxicology recognizes the limits of not considering multi-exposure, the appropriation and production of regulatory toxicology suppresses this nuance. Currently, ergotoxicology faces heterogeneous confrontations, considering the technical and regulatory models that exist and that allow, for example, authorizing the introduction of agrochemicals on the market, at European or national level. The dominant models for authorizing the introduction of pesticides onto the market are based on controlled studies in which farmers are told what to do, how to do it and what equipment they must carry. As ergotoxicology investigates using uncontrolled models, i.e. it considers the complexity of the activity and the specificities of the activity, the knowledge we produce is disqualified in relation to the dominant models. But, necessarily, in the dominant models, the levels of exposure are minimized in relation to the reality of what is found in the field. Finally, it is essential to educate and debate the validity of these models. We also need to consider the macro level, where the technical-regulatory production materializes; often built with the participation of industry representatives, which forces us to consider the issue of lobbies, present in political arenas. In the case of agriculture, these lobbies aim to impose/maintain industrial agriculture and destroy family farming as we know it. It’s about imposing a capitalist model of agriculture, where large investments, especially Chinese ones, are made in major crops, such as wheat production. As wheat is indexed on the Chicago Stock Exchange, the economic model suggests selling when its value is on the rise, in order to get the highest possible return; there is a strong movement in Europe to move in this direction. Although there is an important debate about whether or not to change the agricultural model, there is a risk that we will lose the ability to feed our own people, but behind this there are economic problems that completely overwhelm us.

Interviewer: You made clear above your view of the limits of the activity of producing knowledge to influence public policies, especially on issues such as pesticides. How do you envision the future development of ergonomics in this scenario?

Alain Garrigou: Our studies suggest that the biggest challenge for ergonomics is to think about the externalities of work. There is a greater challenge in the case of the use of agrochemicals, and an externality resulting from this technology, which absolutely needs to be discussed, is the pollution it causes to groundwater and drinking water and the farcical cost of this pollution. If we put this cost on the bill for agricultural economic production, the model completely explodes. Even so, there are players in the sector and politicians who don’t want to discuss these externalities. They know about them, but they don’t want to. This issue is essential.

Thus, ergotoxicology makes ergonomics aware of the need for a new health model that takes the environment into account, overcoming the health model centered on men or women at work and its aspects - that of altered health, adaptation of room for maneuver and that centered on development²³. Although these three models of health have limitations, they remain useful to articulate with each other, both in adapting to work and for the development of people, work situations and organizations.

In short, the interesting thing about the development model is that it seeks to emancipate workers through their activity. The question we have to answer is how far this emancipation goes and how this question also concerns the ergonomist himself. In other words, how the ergonomist also needs, as a worker, to emancipate himself from models that continue to exploit the planet’s resources

Concluding what I said at the beginning, the utopia of ergotoxicology is that it will no longer be necessary, that is, when there are no more workers exposed to substances that are dangerous to their health and to life in general. We are still on the move, guided by our utopia.

References

• ¹ Duraffourg J, Vuillon B. Alain Wisner et les tâches du present: la bataille du travail réel. Toulouse: Octarès; 2004.
• ² Puyo V. Pour une prospective du travail: les mutations et transitions du Travail à hauteur d'Hommes: Habilitation à Diriger des recherches. Lyon: Université Lumière Lyon; 2020.
• ³ Galey L, Garrigou A. A ergotoxicologia, da palavra aos conceitos e às metodologias. Laboreal. 2020;16(2). https://doi.org/10.4000/laboreal.16406
  » https://doi.org/10.4000/laboreal.16406
• ⁴ Villatte R. Toxicologie et ergonomie. In: Cassou B, Huez D, Mousel ML, Spitzer C, Touranchet A. Les risques du travail. Paris: La Découverte; 1985. p. 301-3.
• ⁵ Delvolvé N. Ergonomie et toxicologie. Le Travail Humain. 1984;17(3):227-35.
• ⁶ Sznelwar L I. Analyse ergonomique de l'exposition de travailleurs agricoles aux pesticides: essai ergo-toxicologique [thèse de doctorat]. Paris: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers; 1992.
• ⁷ Garrigou A, Mohammed-Brahim, Daniellou F. Une approche ergonomique des chantiers de déflocage de l'amiante: après le matériau-roi et le banissemenet, le temps d'un nouveau métiers? In: Actès du XXXIII Congrès de la Société d'ergonomie de langue farnçaise; 1998 16-18 sept; Paris, France. p. 713-23.
• ⁸ Garrigou A. Les apports des confrontations, les orientations socio-cognitives au sein du processus de conception participatifs: le rôle de l'ergonomie [thèse de doctorat]. Paris: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers; 1992.
• ⁹ Teiger C, Lavielle A, Duraffourg J. Tâches répétitives sous contrainte de temps et charge de travail. Etude des conditions de travail dans un atelier de confection Paris: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers; 1973. (Rapport, n 39).
• ¹⁰ Guérin F, Laville A, Daniellou F, Duraffourg J, Kerguelen A. Compreender o trabalho para transformá-lo: a prática da ergonomia. São Paulo: Blucher; 2001.
• ¹¹ Castro IS, Campos NA, Assunção AÁ, Lima FPA. Diferenças interindividuais em teleatendimento de emergências: explicitação por meio da entrevista de autoconfrontação. Rev Bras Saude Ocup 2006;31(114):83-96. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0303-76572006000200008
  » https://doi.org/10.1590/S0303-76572006000200008
• ¹² Baldi I, Lebailly P, Rondeau V, Bouchart V, Blanc-Lapierre A, Bouvier G, et al. Levels and determinants of pesticide exposure in operators involved in treatment of vineyards: results of the PESTEXPO Study. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2012;22:593-600. https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2012.82
  » https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2012.82
• ¹³ Garrigou A, Baldi I, Dubuc P. Apports de l'ergotoxicologie à l'évaluation de l'efficacité réelle des EPI: de l'analyse de la contamination au processus collectif d'alerte. Pistes. 2008;10(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/pistes.2137
  » https://doi.org/10.4000/pistes.2137
• ¹⁴ Garrigou A. Le développement de l'ergotoxicologie: une contribution de l'ergonomie à la santé au travail. Bordeaux: Université Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2; 2011.
• ¹⁵ Judon N. Rendre possible un espace intermédiaire de dialogue pour co-construire de nouvelles solutions de prévention dans un contexte d'incertitude. Cas des travaux de revêtements routiers [thèse de doctorat]. Bordeaux: Université de Bordeaux; 2017.
• ¹⁶ Goutille F, Galey L, Rambaud C, Pasquereau P, Jackson Filho, JM, Garrigou A. Prescrição e utilização de equipamentos de proteção individual (epi) em atividades com exposição a produtos químicos cancerígenos, mutagênicos e reprotóxicos (cmr): pesquisa-ação pluridisciplinar em uma fábrica francesa de decoração para móveis. Laboreal. 2016;2(1):23-38. https://doi.org/10.15667/LABOREALXII0116FG
  » https://doi.org/10.15667/LABOREALXII0116FG
• ¹⁷ Galey, L. Comprendre les situations d'exposition aux nanoparticules par l'intégration de l'activité de travail à la mesure: vers une construction de la prévention [thèse de doctorat]. Bordeaux: Ecole doctorale Sociétés, Politique, Santé Publique, Université de Bordeaux; 2019.
• ¹⁸ Jolly, C. Les pratiques professionnelles des propriétaires exploitants agricoles sont-elles des ressources pour limiter l'exposition cutanée aux pesticides? [thèse de doctorat]. Montréal: UQAM; 2022.
• ¹⁹ Goutille, F. Ne plus ignorer les agriculteurs: une contribution de l'ergonomie à la prévention du risque pesticides en milieu viticole [thèse de doctorat]. Bordeaux: Université de Bordeaux; 2022.
• ²⁰ Albert, M. Comprendre les situations d'exposition aux pesticides lors de l'utilisation des pulvérisateurs. La conception et la réglementation comme chaîne de déterminants [thèse de doctorat]. Bordeaux: Université de Bordeaux; 2022.
• ²¹ Albert M, Judon N, Jolly C, Goutille F, Galey L, Mohammed-Brahim B, Garrigou A. La notion de marge de manœuvre en ergotoxicologie: un usage opérant vis-à-vis de l'activité de protection. In: Coutarel F, Zare M, Caroly S, Aublet-Cuvelier A, Vézina N, Garrigou A, Roquelaure Y. Marges de manœuvre: des concepts à la transformation du travail. Toulouse: Octarès; 2024. p. 231-48.
• ²² Daniellou F. Le statut de la pratique et des connaissances dans l'intervention ergonomique de conception [habilitation à diriger des recherches]. Toulouse: Université de Toulouse; 1992.
• ²³ Guérin F, Pueyo V, Béguin P, Garrigou A, Hubault F, Maline J, Morlet T. Concevoir le travail, le défi de l'ergonomie. Toulouse: Octarès; 2021.

• d
  Interview conducted on July 28, 2023, during the post-doctoral internships of Angela Paula Simonelli and José Marçal Jackson Filho, at Alain Garrigou’s residence in Pessac, France. The three researchers are taking part in the international thematic project Innovation and transformation of occupational risk prevention (Itapar), funded by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP), number2019/13525-0, and by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
• e
  Expression proposed by Alain Wisner.
• f
  Construction and public works prevention professional body. Institution provided for in the French Labor Code.
• g
  His doctoral thesis looked at developments in production system design at two Parisian newspapers.
• h
  National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
• i
  Cancer epidemiology and environmental exposures.
• j
  It’s worth mentioning the classic study on television line work at the end of the 1960s, which combined activity observations and physiological measurements.
• k
  National Institute for Research and Safety, equivalent to Fundacentro, in France.
• l
  Exposure to pesticides.
• m
  See alert published in the journal PISTES.
• n
  National Agency for Health, Food, Environmental and Occupational Safety.
• o
  French Agency for Health, Environmental and Occupational Safety.
• p
  A type of research grant funded by a private partner (company), which is supervised by a company technician and an academic professor, and which aims to respond to technological needs raised by companies. The acronym Cifre stands for “Conventions industrielles de formation par la recherche”, which can be translated as “Industrial conventions for training through research”.
• q
  Name given to wineries in the Bordeaux region.
• r
  Multidisciplinary work, in ergonomics and law, which won the multidisciplinary research award the year it was defended.
• s
  In particular, thanks to the interactions with Nathalie Jass and Jouzel.
• Data availability:
  The entire data set supporting the results of this study has been published in the article itself.
• Presentation at a scientific event:
  The authors declare that the study has not been presented at a scientific event.
• Funding:
  The authors declare that the study was not funded.

Edited by

• Editor-in-Chief:
  Leila Posenato Garcia

Data availability

The entire data set supporting the results of this study has been published in the article itself.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  31 Mar 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  23 Dec 2024
• Accepted
  06 Jan 2025