Mitigation Measures for Exposure to Pesticides

Publisher Summary This chapter is an attempt to describe how EMMs can be developed and advocated more effectively by exposure assessors to assist their risk management in reducing the exposure(s) of concern. It focuses primarily on those EMMs used for the protection of agricultural workers and of individuals who may come in contact with pesticide residues inadvertently. It first identifies five elements fundamental to the development of pesticide EMMs, including evaluation for potential adverse health effects and the use of EMMs at a reasonable cost. In practice, regulatory scientists, especially those working at the exposure assessment end, are the ones that typically assist the risk management team in using exposure mitigation measures (EMMs) to reduce the exposure of concern. EMMs are simply controls, methods, tools, restrictions, or other actions taken by responsible authorities to (help) reduce the exposure(s) of concern. The chapter concludes with several real cases of pesticide EMMs used in the United States, including those used specifically in the state of California. The two cases particularly unique to handler exposures in California are the EMMs used for handler exposures to methyl bromide and EPTC (s-ethyl dipropylthiocarbamate). For these two pesticides, other measures along with PPE and engineering controls were required in order to adequately comply with the mitigation requirements.