A national-scale cumulative exposure assessment of organophosphorus pesticides through dietary vegetable consumption in China

Abstract

Using the data from the “Agro-product Quality and Safety Risk Monitoring Plan” of the Ministry of Agriculture of China between 2012 and 2016, acute and chronic risk assessments of cumulative exposure to organophosphorus pesticides (OPPs) through vegetable consumption were conducted. The concentrations of 19 OPPs were measured in a total of 75,655 vegetable samples from urban and rural sites located in 31 provinces and covering 95 vegetable raw agricultural commodities (RACs). The results showed that 4989 samples (6.59%) contained at least one OPP and that 615 samples (0.81%) contained various combinations of OPPs. From the multiexposure data, the cumulative exposure was estimated for 19 OPPs using an equivalence approach, where the contribution of each OPP was calculated according to its measured concentration and its relative potency factor (RPF) with respect to acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition of the index compound methamidophos. The cumulative exposure levels of OPPs were compared across ten age and sex subpopulation groups of Chinese under lower boundary (LB) and upper boundary (UB) scenarios to handle left-censored residue data. The highest cumulative exposure level of OPPs was observed in the subpopulation of children aged 2–7 years under the UB scenario. The P99.9 and P97.5 exposure levels in different subpopulation groups under both LB and UB scenarios did not exceed the acute reference dose (ARfD) or chronic acceptable daily intake (ADI) of methamidophos, respectively. This study is the first to investigate the cumulative exposure of OPPs in relation to neurotoxic health risks in China on the national level.