Farming is bad for health?

Breast cancer more common in farm workers: study
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2006/10/12/breastcancer-farm.html

"Women who had worked on farms were 2.8 times more likely to develop breast cancer than non-farmers randomly selected from the region's population, according to the study in Thursday's issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences"

and

"Exposure to pesticides or other farm contaminants such as diesel fumes or growth hormones may explain the increased risk, said study author James Brophy, executive director of the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers in Windsor."

Brophy and his colleagues factored out traditional breast cancer risk factors such as genetics, smoking, age, number of children and use of hormone replacement therapies.

Consider that this is where the food we eat is grown, and that the toxins that are probably responsible are spread far and wide- into the water table, in residues on foods- although their effect on farmworkers is no doubt far more concentrated.

This reminds me of a book I'm reading where someone, asked to provide an example of irony, answers "the fact that we 'clean' our homes with substances that are identified as poisons on the containers they come in- with skulls and crossbones no less."