Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children: Twenty years of progress in assessing children's dietary exposure to pesticides

摘要

Early lifestage exposure to certain pesticides has been associated with adverse health effects including neurobehavioral deficits and cancer. Protecting children from the effects of dietary pesticide exposure requires risk assessment methodologies that consider children's unique characteristics, such as less variety in diet and greater consumption of food per unit of body weight compared to adults. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) called attention to these issues in publishing their landmark report Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children in 1993. Three years later, the U.S. Congress unanimously passed the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), requiring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement several of the report's recommendations in its risk assessment processes, including using updated food consumption data based on children's dietary patterns, considering both cumulative and aggregate exposure, and incorporating an additional safety factor to better protect health during early lifestages. On the 20th anniversary of the report, we focus on the NAS recommendations which EPA is not legally mandated to incorporate in risk assessments, such as the use of probabilistic exposure distributions and data describing the impact of food preparation on residue levels. We discuss the extent to which EPA has implemented the recommendations that were not required by FQPA and the challenges faced in implementing the remaining recommendations. Finally, looking toward the future of risk assessment for children's dietary exposure to pesticides, we review recent recommendations from internal and external advisors and the peer-reviewed literature. We explore additional areas of focus, such as the use of epidemiological data in quantitative risk determinations and continued support of data collection on children's exposure to pesticides, and discuss remaining opportunities to improve the protection of children worldwide through dietary risk assessment.