This department published incidents of pesticide poisonings and accidents as a record of occupational health in the workplace fields. Health as a whole, though at that time was focused on the Germ theory of disease as a whole rather than on the local environment, so pesticide poisonings were not seen as major issues back then. In the late 1940s however, a population boom after World War II, demanded more agriculture, and California was increasingly farming more crops like grapes to which its agriculture required more pesticides.