Kinetics of hydrolysis of diazinon and diazoxon.

Abstract

The widespread use of organic insecticides 1 in agricultural pest control has raised considerable concern over their potential contamination of water resources. More recently, however, direct analysis by gas-liquid chromatography indicates that most surface waters and some ground waters contain trace amounts of organic insecticides. Consequently, these raw water supplies may have to be monitored in order to avoid adverse effects from their ultimate domestic use as drinking water. Two general classes of insecticides are in wide use, the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphorus compounds. The former has high residual activity and has been implicated, in many cases, as the etiological agent for fish mortalities and other examples of deterioration of wildlife activity (Rosen and Middleton 1959, Swenson 1962, Nicholson et al. 1964, Weiss and Gakstatter 1965). On the other hand, previous hydrolysis studies suggest that organophosphorus insecticides, under specific environmental conditions, may have low residual life in aqueous solutions.