National short-term dietary exposure assessment of a selected group of pesticides in Argentina

ABSTRACT

An evaluation of acute dietary exposure to pesticide residues, applying deterministic and stochastic methods, was performed for a selected group of pesticides in two representative age groups from Argentina. Thus, 28 active ingredients (a.i.) and 75 food items were evaluated for the group of 2–5-year-old children, while 9 a.i. and 59 food items were considered for the 10–49-year-old women group. A deterministic assessment was conducting following the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) procedure but using the national maximum residue limits (MRLs) as pesticide residue concentration data, while in the stochastic approach, a theoretical distribution modeled with the available information was used. Food consumption data were obtained from the 2004–2005 comprehensive national nutrition and health survey. The risk was estimated by comparing the short-term dietary exposure with the acute reference dose (ARfD) values for each pesticide-food combination evaluated. In the deterministic assessment, 173 (39.1%) and 40 (31.3%) combinations exceeded the ARfD thresholds for the 2–5-year-old children and 10–49-year-old women groups, respectively. This conservative study generated relevant information as a first stage of acute dietary risk assessment in Argentina.

KEYWORDS:

• Acute risk assessment
• dietary exposure
• pesticide residue
• stochastic modeling
• ARfD

Funding

This study was supported by research funds from MINCYT and the National University of Littoral (UNL), Argentina.

Supplementary material

 

Figure 1S. Comparative chart of the number of times each food was evaluated (“n total” in blue) vs the number of times that the same food for the given compounds under study exceeded the deterministic %ARfD (“n exceeding” in red), in decreasing order of the number of excesses, for the 10–49 year-old women group.