Abstract

Exposure assessment to pesticides is complex due to the wide variety of active ingredients used, multiple exposure routes (inhalation, dermal, and ingestion), and exposure potential during actual application but also in tasks that involve contact with produce that have been recently treated or contaminated equipment. As measurements are often prohibitively expensive to conduct and are limited by the large temporal variance in exposure most studies have applied either statistical, physical, or deterministic exposure models to reconstruct exposures. However, such models may have considerable uncertainties and may introduce lower or higher observed correlations between active ingredients resulting in limitations in the interpretation of epidemiological studies. In this talk we will explore the current state of pesticide exposure assessment and present recent efforts to improve exposure assessment in epidemiological studies.