Assessment of occupational exposure to pesticides in a pooled analysis of agricultural cohorts within the AGRICOH consortium: authors’ response

In his letter, Tomenson1 provides his opinion on the development and use of crop-exposure matrices (CEMs) in a pooling project within the AGRICOH consortium.2 Although overall his concerns repeat acknowledged limitations of the developed CEMs, discussed in detail in our paper, we disagree with his conclusion. Tomenson concludes that “it is difficult to see how the pooling project can be worthwhile unless the exposure measures are greatly improved.” Part of this conclusion is based on his interpretation of low agreement between self-reported pesticide use in the Agricultural Health Study (AHS) and exposure assigned to this population using two CEM approaches approximating methods developed …