Pesticide pollution has raised public concern in Denmark due to potentialnegative health impacts and frequent findings of new substances after arecent expansion of the groundwater monitoring programme. Danish drinking water comes entirely from groundwater. Both the raw groundwater andthe treated drinking water are regularly monitored, and the chemical analyses are reported to a publicly available national database (Jupiter). Basedon these data, in this study we (1) provide a status of pesticide content indrinking water supplied by public waterworks in Denmark and (2) assessthe proportion of Danish households exposed to pesticides from drinkingwater. ‘Pesticides’ here refers also to their metabolites, degradation andreaction products. The cleaned dataset represents 3004 public waterworksdistributed throughout the country and includes 39 798 samples of treateddrinking water analysed for 449 pesticides (971 723 analyses total) for theperiod 2002–2019. Of all these chemical analyses, 0.5% (n = 4925) containeda quantified pesticide (>0.03 μg/l). Pesticides were found at least once inthe treated drinking water at 29% of all sampled public waterworks forthe period 2002–2019 and at 21% of the waterworks for the recent period2015–2019. We estimate that 56% of all Danish households were potentiallyexposed at least once to pesticides in drinking water at concentrations of0.03–4.00 μg/l between 2002 and 2019. However, in 2015–2019, the proportion of the Danish households exposed to pesticides (0.03–4.00 μg/l)was 41%. The proportion of Danish households potentially exposed at leastonce to pesticides above the maximum allowed concentration (0.1 μg/l)according to the EU Drinking Water Directive (and the Danish drinking waterstandard) was 19% for 2002–2019 and 11% for 2015–2019. However, themaximum concentrations were lower than the World Health Organization’scompound-specific guidelines. Lastly, we explore data complexity and discuss the limitations imposed by data heterogeneity to facilitate future epidemiological studies.
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