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PESTICIDE RESULTS FROM AN INTERAGENCY EFFORT TO CHARACTERIZE CONTAMINANTS IN CHILD CARE CENTERS
Citation:
Tulve, N S., R C. Fortmann, J. Zhou, W. Friedman, A. Fraser, D. Marker, S. M. Viet, C. Cave, G. M. Kyle, AND S. Kyle. PESTICIDE RESULTS FROM AN INTERAGENCY EFFORT TO CHARACTERIZE CONTAMINANTS IN CHILD CARE CENTERS. Presented at Society of Risk Analysis Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, December 7-10, 2003.
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:
Approximately 13 million children are placed in non-parental child care during the work day; but, children's exposures to chemicals in child care centers have not been characterized. To address this data gap, three federal agencies teamed to characterize contaminants in child care centers. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, in collaboration with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), characterized young children's potential exposures to lead, allergens, and pesticides in randomly-selected licensed institutional child care centers. Multi-stage sampling with clustering was used to select approximately 150 child care centers in 30 primary sampling units in the United States. Child care centers were recruited into the study by telephone interviewers. Samples for lead, allergens, and pesticides were collected at multiple locations in each child care center by field technicians. Environmental data and information collected included the following: (1) Pesticide measurements on floors, other surfaces in the center, and soil collected near a play area, (2) Lead measurements on surfaces, soil, and paint, (3) Allergen measurements in dust, and (4) Information on center characteristics, pesticide use practices and application information, and demographics. By participating in this study, EPA will obtain valuable information on pesticide usage in child care centers, concentrations of pesticides on surfaces in the centers that children may contact, and the distribution of pesticides within child care centers. Results from this study will provide improved approaches for estimating children's exposures and data that can directly support the requirements of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996.
This work has been funded in part by the US EPA under MOBIS contract no. 23F-8144H to Westat, Inc. It has been subjected to Agency review and approved for publication.