Biological Monitoring for Pesticide Risk Assessment in Farmers and Rural Population with a Tiered Protocol

OBJECTIVES: The assessment of exposure and of exposure-related risk for pesticides is a burdensome and expensive task. Since farmers are often exposed to many active substances, several times per year, at different working and environmental conditions, and their families, including children pregnant and breastfeeding women, the elderly, share the same environment, biological monitoring is the most promising technique for this purpose. However, there is still a difficulty to use the actual results of biological monitoring to assess individual risk, mainly due to the lack of suitable exposure limits. METHODS: To overcome this knowledge gap, the ICRH is currently establishing provisional Equivalent Biological Exposure Limits (EBELs) for priority pesticides. This multi-tiered approach exploits the extensive, although scattered information available in the scientific literature, in the authorization documents available from regulatory bodies, and the analysis of results from field studies. RESULTS: The established theoretical and computational basis and examples of the employed approach will be presented. In particular, it is possible to discriminate occupational exposure from agricultural tasks, including re-entry into treated fields, repair of agricultural equipment, from that of everyday life, from drinking water and from food. As proof-of-principle, the proposal of provisional EBELs for some priority pesticides, and an application to different agricultural tasks performed by Italian wine growers will be demonstrated. CONCLUSIONS: The establishment of a robust protocol for the determination of EBELs will allow individual risk assessment for farmers, for their families and for the general population of rural areas with moderate effort and cost. REFERENCES: Rubino FM, Mandic-Rajcevic S, Colosio C. et al. Toxicol Lett. 2012 Apr 25;210(2):189-97. Colosio C, Rubino FM, Alegakis A, Mandic-Rajcevic S, et al. Toxicol Lett. 2012 Aug 13;213(1):49-56.