How many premature deaths from pesticide suicide have occurred since the agricultural Green Revolution?

Introduction: The agricultural Green Revolution in the 1950s and 60s is thought to have averted many deaths from famine. However, it also introduced highly hazardous pesticides such as parathion and endrin into poor rural communities that were totally unequipped to store or use them safely. Pesticide self-poisoning rapidly became one of the two most common global means of suicide. Thus far, no attempt has been made to enumerate the total number of deaths that have occurred subsequent to the Green Revolution.Objective: To calculate plausible estimates for the total global number of pesticide suicides that have occurred since 1960.Methods: We performed a literature review on Medline and Embase databases to July 2019 to find papers that reported national or global numbers…