Because they are more heavily consumed, apples, peaches, applesauce, popcorn,
grapes, corn chips, and apple juice expose the most children ages six months through
five years to unsafe levels of OPs. Just over half of children who eat an unsafe level of
OPs each day, 575,000, receive this unsafe dose from apple products alone. Many of
these exposures exceed safe levels by wide margins. OPs on apples, peaches, grapes,
pear baby food, and pears cause 85,000 children each day to consume more than the
federal safety standard by a factor of ten or more.^34
OP Residue ‘‘Hot Spots’’
The FQPA requires the use of an additional safety factor to account for the fact
that some pesticides pose greater toxicological risks to fetuses and young children
than to adults. According to the act, an added safety factor should also be imposed in
cases where there are gaps or uncertainties in exposure estimates. Also, common
high-end residues in several children’s foods can expose a child to more than what
would be regarded as acceptable, even for residues in a single food consumed during
a given day.
There are, in fact, several dozen crop-pesticide combinations that will periodically
result in residues high enough to put some children over the EPA’s daily acceptable
OP exposure levels. The EPA has no control over and only modest potential to pre-
dict where and when such pesticide residue ‘‘hot spots’’ will materialize. The only
thing that is predictable is that some will occur each year across the United States
and around the globe, driven by unusually intense pest pressure and/or the collapse
of effective pest management systems. This is often associated with the emergence of
new and/or resistant strains of pests.
The result will be a sudden increase of relatively high OP residues in the American
diet stemming from crop-pesticide combinations that have never been seen before.
These will contribute markedly to exposure risk. These OP hot spots will make
attainment of the basic FQPA safety standard fleeting, and, over the long term, nearly
impossible, unless the EPA takes actions across eighty to 120 OP-crop uses to reduce
their likelihoods and severity.
In the revised organophosphate-cumulative risk assessment (OP-CRA), the use of
dimethoate on grapes is an example of a residue-driven hot spot. Dimethoate
accounted for almost one-half of the total OP risk among one- to two-year-old chil-
dren. While this accounts for a major risk factor among all food-OP combinations, it
would be wrong to conclude that the problems posed by dietary OP residues can be
solved by phasing out this and a half-dozen other uses that, in this particular OP-
CRA, account for the lion’s share of risks. This is because the revised OP-CRA results
are a snapshot of a very complex landscape that can and does change dramatically
with the seasons and as pest pressure varies across different crops.
It is important to point out a strong downward bias in the revised OP-CRA
results. The risk levels projected take into account OP risk mitigation measures to
date. But the results are also based on an implicit assumption that farmers who
Pesticides in Food | 91