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THE EPA CHILDREN'S PESTICIDE EXPOSURE MEASUREMENT PROGRAM
Citation:
Sheldon, L S., E A. CohenHubal, AND R. C. Fortmann. THE EPA CHILDREN'S PESTICIDE EXPOSURE MEASUREMENT PROGRAM. Presented at Workshop on Exposure of Children to Pesticides, Berlin, Germany, September 27-29, 2001.
Impact/Purpose:
1. To identify those pesticides, pathways, and activities that represent the highest potential exposures to children;
2. To determine the factors that influence pesticide exposures to children;
3. To develop methods for measuring multimedia exposures to children, including methods that account for important activities that take place in home, school, and day care settings;
4. To generate data on multimedia pesticide concentrations, pesticide biomarkers, and exposure factors that can be used as inputs to aggregate exposure models for children.
Description:
The U.S. EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory conducts research in support of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA)) of 1996. FQPA requires that children's risks to pesticide exposures be considered during the tolerance-setting process. FQPA requires exposure assessments to be conducted for all potential sources, routes and pathways, not just dietary intake. It also requires that exposure assessments use high quality and high quantity exposure data or models based on exposure factors generated from existing, reliable data.
Currently, data on children's exposures and activities are very limited and insufficient to support quantitative assessments that do not rely heavily on major default assumptions as substitutes for missing information. Results derived from an initial assessment of critical exposure pathways and factors for assessing children's residential exposures to pesticides indicate that dermal exposure and nondietary ingestion may result in high exposures for children following residential applications. However, there are so few data associated with these pathways that exposure estimates may vary by orders of magnitude, depending upon the assumptions and exposure factors selected. Studies across all ages of children, but especially for very young children, are required to characterize activities that contribute to dermal exposure in important microenvironments. Studies are also needed to characterize contact and transfer factors for non-dietary ingestion.
The goal of our program is to develop and evaluate protocols for assessing children's aggregate exposure to pesticides, and to conduct fields studies to collect data required to reduce the reliance on default assumptions in development of quantitative exposure assessments. To address this goal, studies are being conducted in the following areas:
1. Microenvironment/macroacitivity patterns for children;
2. Pesticide use patterns;
3. Distribution of pesticide residues in nonoccupational microenvironments;
4. Exposure measurements using the microactivity assessment approach;
5. Exposure assessments using the macroactivity assessment approach; and
6. Field studies to verify assessment methods.
A review and outputs of specific studies will be presented.
This work has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under contract nos. 68D99011 to Battelle and 68D990112 to Research Triangle Institute. It has been subjected to Agency review and approved for publication.