Our study found that the incidence of drift-related pesticide poisoning was higher among female and younger agricultural workers and in western states.
The overall incidence rate of drift-related pesticide poisoning was 2.93 per million person-years (Table 1).
The largest change in allele frequencies was seen between the NET2010 and 2011 samples (Fs' = 0.0635), and this incidence of strong genetic drift is likely the cause of the low mean Ne values estimated for the NET site over the whole sampling period.
There are problems with making the correlations in Figure 5 across all four clades, since the clades have different average rates of drift and incidence.
Even if the rate of drift and incidence were constant year-over-year for each clade (and simply differed among clades), the authors would observe the correlation that they report.
Objective: We estimated the incidence of acute illnesses from pesticide drift from outdoor agricultural applications and characterized drift exposure and illnesses.
The putative bottleneck in the eastern house finch population was short and the population has been rapidly growing for the last 60 years, perhaps resulting in lower levels of drift and a higher incidence of polymorphisms, albeit at low frequency.
The correlation between incidence and drift further suggests the possibility of using HI data at the start of an influenza season to predict which lineage will subsequently predominate.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.01914.012 However, it is possible that if sampling count influences cartographic estimates then a spurious correlation could arise in which years with greater incidence have higher sample counts and artifactually high estimates of drift.
