Abstract |
The Pilot Study of Children's Total Exposure to Persistent Pesticides and Other Persistent Organic Pollutants (CTEPP) investigated the aggregate exposures of 257 preschool children and their primary adult caregivers to pollutants commonly detected in their everyday environments. The target compounds include organophosphate (OP) pesticides, OP metabolites, organochlorine (OC) pesticides, pyrethroid pesticides and metabolites, acid herbicides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), phthalates, phenols, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), PAH metabolites, and atrazine. Some of the target compounds are persistent indoors and sometimes outdoors, so that very low levels may exist in the children's surroundings and provide a source of non-acute exposure. The primary purposes of the research were to increase the understanding of children's exposures to persistent and non-persistent organic pollutants, and to gain information on the various activities, environmental media, and pollutant characteristics that may influence children's exposures. The overall objectives were to measure the aggregate exposures of approximately 260 preschool children and their adult caregivers to low levels of a suite of pesticides and other organic pollutants that the children may encounter in their everyday environments and to apportion the routes of exposure and estimate the relative contributions of each route. Within these objectives, four major, specific goals for the CTEPP study were accomplished in this report. These goals were: (1) to measure the concentrations of the target pollutants in multimedia samples collected at the homes and at day care centers of 257 preschool children in six North Carolina (NC) counties and six Ohio (OH) counties, (2) to determine the distributions of child characteristics, activities, and locations that contributed to their exposures, (3) to estimate the aggregate exposures of the preschool children to these pollutants that they may encounter in their everyday
environments, and (4) to apportion the routes of exposure. Results will also be used to identify important hypotheses to be tested in future research.
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