Review of the published exposure data to pesticides for residents and bystanders, and for environmental risk assessment: Final report

Over the last 30-40 years there has been growing concern regarding the contamination of the environment by pesticides and public concerns regarding their own exposure to pesticides began to gain momentum around the early 2000s. In 2014, the 'EFSA Guidance on the assessment of exposure of operators, workers, residents and bystanders in risk assessment for plant protection products' and a spreadsheet calculator to facilitate calculation of exposures were published. The datasets on which the calculations are made are restricted in terms of there being a limited number of studies and incompleteness. Consequently, EFSA have commissioned a study to review and evaluate all published data related to the exposure to pesticides for residents and bystanders and for environmental risk assessment. The aim of this project is to collate all published data for the last 25-years relating to resident and bystander exposure to pesticides and to develop and populate a database to support non-dietary exposure assessments for regulatory purposes. There are 4 themes to the review (1) resident and bystander exposure to pesticides; (2) air concentrations (vapours and aerosols) of plant protection substances; (3) drift values from spray, seed and granular applications both in the field and undercover; and (4) dislodgeable foliar residues. The data is being collated via a systematic and extensive literature review defined and managed according to a pre-defined 'review protocol'. A database and associated management software have been developed to process, collate and store the data collected. A total, across all four research themes, of around 3000 documents were considered. For dislodgeable foliar residues 27 articles were found to match the quality criteria and data for 49 discrete studies was extracted from these. For air concentrations 26 articles were used to extract data for 84 studies and with respect to drift 55 articles resulted in data for 275 studies being extracted. For these three reviews the data identified should be valuable for updating the GD calculator and for various other risk assessment studies. For the fourth review relating to the exposure of bystanders and residents 5 articles were found to match the required inclusion criteria and this lead to data for 8 studies being extracted.