Browsing by Author "Fantke, Peter"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Open Access
Health impact assessment of pesticide use in Europe
(2012) Fantke, Peter; Friedrich, Rainer (Prof. Dr.-Ing.)
Technology assessments in Europe have mainly focused on air quality management with respect to energy conversion and road transport. However, other environmental media must also be considered to arrive at an integrated perspective for developing strategies towards more sustainability and an improved human welfare. Consequently, bioaccumulation of pollutants in the environment, in food crops and in animal food products leads to human ingestion exposure that must be accounted for. In addition, growing crops for use as energy, biofuels and non-energy raw materials becomes more and more important in the context of current policy. Unfortunately, only little is known about how the health of the general population is affected by current agriculture in Europe, especially with respect to the use of pesticides. Over the last three decades, European policy has developed towards a large legislation body regulating the marketing and use of pesticides as well as their residues in drinking water and various food items. Nonetheless, residues are still reported to reach levels where they can harm humans or the environment. Especially effects of pesticides on human health have lead to a continuously concerned general public. Existing regulations are therefore under constant revision by steadily evaluating the negative consequences of pesticide application based on continuously required scientific support. Thereby, evaluating exposure to pesticides and related health effects must build upon a deterministic understanding of the pathways from substance application via loss to the environment and uptake into the different food crops to finally human intake. However, current assessment tools are still challenged by the inherent complexity of plant uptake and translocation mechanisms as well as by an insufficient understanding of substance-specific chemical transformation, post-harvest food processing and health effects. The present work, hence, aims at improving existing health impact assessments of pesticide use by contrasting pathways of human exposure to pesticides. Main challenges were to consider characteristics of different food crops, to characterize individual pesticide-crop combinations and to simplify a complex dynamic model for incorporation into existing assessment tools to also account for the pesticide fraction that directly reaches the target crops. To address these challenges, a new operational modeling approach was developed for quantifying health impacts from exposure to pesticide residues in multiple directly treated food crops based on transparent matrix algebra. From analyzing its functioning and uncertainty, the system was parameterized for use in existing models, thereby keeping crops and substances disaggregated. In a case study, the new approach was applied to estimate health impacts and related damage costs caused by the five most extensively used pesticides in each of 25 European countries in 2003. Results indicate a high variation of impacts between countries as a function of the amount applied and substance toxicity. Total health impacts amount to 1672 DALY (disability-adjusted life years), to which the fraction reaching the target crops and the fraction lost to the environment during application contribute with 97% and 3%, respectively. Spain with 485, Italy with 442 and France with 370 DALY show the highest impacts per country. If translated into costs, damages amount to 67 million Euro in Europe in 2003. Results demonstrate the importance of considering pesticide residues in treated food crops for estimating overall human health impacts as integral part of evaluating current pesticide use in Europe.