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REVISED POLICY ANNOUNCED FOR REGULATING SHORT-TERM PESTICIDE EXPOSURE
Release Date: 03/23/2000
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FOR RELEASE: THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2000
REVISED POLICY ANNOUNCED FOR REGULATING
SHORT-TERM PESTICIDE EXPOSURE
SHORT-TERM PESTICIDE EXPOSURE
On March 22 EPA published a notice of availability in the Federal Register for a revised science policy that the Agency will use to regulate potential exposures to pesticides resulting from their use on food crops. The policy, titled “Choosing a Percentile of Acute Dietary Exposure as a Threshold of Regulatory Concern,” was one of the issues identified by the Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee as crucial to implementing tolerance reassessment under the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. Under the Act, EPA is required to reassess the maximum pesticide residue limits on food. EPA uses a variety of reliable data sources on food consumption and pesticide residues, together with a probabilistic statistical analysis (often called Monte Carlo) to calculate estimated pesticide exposure. This method of estimating exposure generally does not underestimate potential exposure. Using this protective approach, if EPA determines that 99.9 percent of the population are exposed to a pesticide at levels below the dose determined to pose negligible risk, then acute dietary exposure to the pesticide would generally meet EPA’s standard of reasonable certainty of no harm. The revised policy announced today explains the Agency’s rationale for using the 99.9th percentile as a standard for regulating pesticides based on short-term exposures through food. EPA believes that setting the regulatory standard at the 99.9th percentile of exposure is fully protective for all populations and is supported by the most current scientific information. The Tolerance Reassessment Advisory Committee (now defunct) was set up as an independent group in 1998 by EPA and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to advise these agencies on reassessment issues. The revised policy is a revision of the draft published for comment on April 7, 1999. It will be available at: https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/trac/science/; the Federal Register notice is available at: http://www.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aces140.html.
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