The pesticide health risk index - An application to the world's countries

While the use of pesticides continues to rise worldwide, our understanding of the pervasiveness of associated contamination and the health risks humans may be exposed to remain limited to small samples size, and based on small geographic scales, the exposed population, or the pesticide types. Using our recent mapping of global pesticide use, we quantify three complementary health risk metrics for 92 active ingredients: (i) the pesticide hazard load (PHL); (ii) the population exposure (PE); and (iii) the human intake relative to the acceptable dose (INTR). We integrated these metrics into the pesticide health risk index (PHRI) to assess the standing of 133 nations against the global averages of PHL and PE and the acceptable levels of INTR using data of 2015 (PHRI > 1 indicates a concern). We found that some low-toxicity ingredients have PHL values equivalent to high-toxicity ones, and hence neglecting low-toxicity ingredients may cause biases in risk assessments. The geography of PHL, PE, and INTR show hotspots across the Americas, East and South Asia, and Europe, but with the EU27 countries generally showing lower PHL than other countries possibly due to strict governance on pesticide use. By our measure, about 1.7 billion people (24% of the world population) reside in close proximity to where pesticide applications are greater than 100 kg-a.i. km⁻² year⁻¹; about 2.3 billion people (32% of the world population) may exceed the acceptable pesticide intake and about 1.1 billion (15% of the world population) may exceed this by 10 fold. We identified 36 countries with PHRI > 1 and 6 countries with PHRI > 5; of these countries, 10 belong to lower-middle and low income economies. Our analyses show that proximity exposure to pesticides may be more widespread than revealed in occupational studies, and therefore assessments of potential health effects over wider scales may be needed.