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THE US EPA'S DERMAL EXPOSURE RESEARCH PROGRAM IN SUPPORT OF THE FOOD QUALITY PROTECTION ACT
Citation:
CohenHubal, E A. AND L S. Sheldon. THE US EPA'S DERMAL EXPOSURE RESEARCH PROGRAM IN SUPPORT OF THE FOOD QUALITY PROTECTION ACT. Presented at X2001 Exposure Assessment in Epidemiology and Practice Conference, Goteborg, Sweden, June 10-13, 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 Food Quality Protection Act 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 pesticides sources, not just food sources. It also requires that 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 (1,2). Results derived from an initial assessment of critical exposure pathways and factors for assessing children's residential exposures to pesticides (1) indicate that dermal exposure and nondietary ingestion may result in high residential exposures for children. 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 the U.S. EPA National Exposure Research Laboratory program in support of FQPA 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. The specific aim of the work described in this presentation is to evaluate the approaches available for assessing dermal exposure resulting from contact with residue contaminated residential surfaces.
This work has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under contract nos. 68-D-99-011 to Battelle and 68-D-99-012 to Research Triangle Institute. It has been subjected to Agency review and approved for publication.