Children Exposed

A 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that pesticide safety thresholds should be lower for children than for adults-up to 10 times lower-due to children's generally higher vulnerability to the effects of certain compounds. In a controversial response to this report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that, as part of its implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which mandates evaluation of aggregate exposure to pesticides and cumulative health risk, it must reassess nearly 10,000 uses for hundreds of pesticides. Among the first pesticides to be reassessed are the widely used organophosphate compounds. Gauging children's aggregate exposure to those pesticides and their cumulative risk is a tremendous task. In