![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.png)
BACKGROUND:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Pesticide Programs’ (OPP) mission is to protect human health and the environment from unreasonable effects of pesticide use. Prior to registering a pesticide, OPP conducts human health and environmental risk assessments to determine the conditions under which a pesticide can be used without resulting in adverse effects. These conditions are reflected in the pesticide’s label. OPP uses information from a variety of sources to understand better whether registered pesticides are causing unanticipated adverse acute and chronic effects on human health. In conducting these assessments, OPP may require upwards of 100 studies in areas such as acute and chronic toxicity, developmental toxicity, and pesticide mobility and persistence. Additionally, pesticide incident data can be an important source of information for risk assessments.
METHODS: The incident team within OPP’s Health Effects Division systematically looks at human pesticide incident information. This incident team routinely conducts “Tier I” incident analysis in which we describe and summarize incidents reports in terms of quantity and severity of incidents. If there are incidents classified as “major” in severity, a review of the more detailed narrative reports on these incidents is performed. EPA collects incident data, which primarily represent acute health effects, through Section 6(a)(2) of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) which mandates registrants to submit information about adverse outcomes resulting from exposure a pesticide for which they hold a registration. These submissions are collected into OPP’s Incident Data System (IDS). The Sentinel Event Notification System for Occupational Risk (SENSOR)-Pesticides data is now routinely incorporated into the incident scoping work as well. SENSOR-Pesticides dataset provides a detailed case narrative, reflects circumstances of occupational exposures occurring in agricultural and other industries and applies a rigorous case certainty index.
RESULTS: The Tier I report makes recommendations on whether there is a need for a more in-depth Tier II analysis. Specifically, a recommendation for further in-depth analyses across a broader set of available incident data sets and an additional review of available epidemiological studies and human toxicology and medical case reports are made based on high frequency and/or severity of incidents in IDS and the preliminary AHS results for a particular active ingredient. Incident memos are included in the publicly-available docket for each chemical under review.
CONCLUSIONS: Pesticide surveillance incident data serves as a valuable information source for OPP human health risk assessments.