Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues from Commodities Alleged to Contain the Highest Contamination Levels.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Toxicology Volume 2011, Article ID 589674, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2011/589674 Research Article Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues from Commodities Alleged to Contain the Highest Contamination Levels Carl K. Winter and Josh M. Katz Department of Food Science and Technology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Carl K. Winter, ckwinter@ Received 29 November 2010; Accepted 16 March 2011 Academic Editor: Ian Munro Copyright © 2011 C. K. Winter and J. M. Katz. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Probabilistic techniques were used to characterize dietary exposure of consumers to pesticides found in twelve commodities impli- cated as having the greatest potential for pesticide residue contamination by a United States-based environmental advocacy group. Estimates of exposures were derived for the ten most frequently detected pesticide residues on each of the twelve commodities based upon residue findings from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program. All pesticide exposure estimates were well below established chronic reference doses (RfDs). Only one of the 120 exposure estimates exceeded 1% of the RfD (methamidophos on bell peppers at 2% of the RfD), and only seven exposure estimates (5.8 percent) exceeded 0.1% of the RfD. Three quarters of the pesticide/commodity combinations demonstrated exposure estimates below 0.01% of the RfD (corresponding to exposures one million times below chronic No Observable Adverse Effect Levels from animal toxicology