Report on the Health Effects of Selected Pesticide Coformulants

Report on the Health Effects of Selected Pesticide Coformulants

6 Recommendations

The results of this project demonstrate that serious adverse health effects are observed for a number of the 18 selected coformulants. This finding is particularly of concern in the light of the limited data availability for some of the selected coformulants and thus, it cannot be excluded that some coformulants may have additional toxicological effects than the ones identifiable on the available database. Consequently, this project points at a need for an improvement of the toxicological database on coformulants.

On the basis of the results obtained in this project, it is recommended that the authorities take further measures to ensure that humans are protected from experiencing adverse health effects following exposure to coformulants used in pesticide formulations.

One measure could be to improve the toxicological database on coformulants in order to enable a detailed hazard assessment of every end-point of relevance to human health e.g., by a revision of the current approval scheme in order to include data requirements on all relevant toxicological end-points either for all the specific coformulants to be used in a given pesticide formulation or for the pesticide formulation itself. As the approval scheme for pesticide formulations already includes data requirements for acute toxicity and for skin and eye irritation, focus could particularly be put on other endpoints such as sensitisation, repeated dose toxicity, neurotoxicity, toxicity to reproduction, mutagenicity/genotoxicity, and carcinogenicity.

Another measure could be a further regulation on the use of coformulants in pesticide formulations in order to ensure that the coformulants for which serious health effects are identified are not allowed for use in pesticide formulations.

It should be born in mind that the 18 selected substances may not be representative for the very high number of different coformulants used in Denmark and therefore, the results obtained in this project may be subjected to some bias. Thus, a first measure could be to perform hazard assessments for more of the coformulants used in Denmark in order to evaluate if the coformulants generally possess toxicological effects of concern for human health.