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We share an update on all things HHRA.

Archived HHRA News Posts
  • Spraying Pesticides HHRA Answers DPR’s Call for Comments on Its “Roadmap” for Transforming Pest Management

    In a January 26, 2023 press release, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) released a provocative report entitled “Sustainable Pest Management: A Roadmap for California.” The Roadmap report sets “ambitious goals and actions to accelerate California’s systemwide transition to sustainable pest management and eliminate prioritized high-risk pesticides by 2050.” Also by 2050, the Roadmap report envisions that “Sustainable pest management has been adopted as the de facto pest management system in California.” The report captures the ideas and input of a diverse stakeholder group that met over two years to help DPR, Cal-EPA, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture develop a comprehensive plan sufficient to transform agriculture in the State from often heavily-pesticide dependent management systems to systems grounded in pest-prevention, biological control, and reduced-risk biopesticides. The Roadmap identifies and addresses most of the factors shaping pest management systems in the State and calls for dozens of new research, education, training, and regulatory initiatives. In order to guide the implementation process, DPR requested comments from the public that were due March 13, 2023. In crafting HHRA’s comments, Chuck Benbrook and Mark Lipson drew on their decades of experience tracking and advising DPR on pesticide use and regulatory issues.

  • HHRA Paper Analyzes Pesticide Dietary Risk in Individual Samples of Foods

    One of the main sources of pesticide exposure is through  the diet. It is critically important to understand pesticide residues in foods and how dietary risks have changed over time. Over the last 20 years HHRA’s Executive Director Charles Benbrook has developed an analytical database that quantifies the relative risk posed by residues in the diet. Known as the Dietary Risk Index (DRI), this  system was created to help researchers compare risk levels across foods and pesticides, track changes in dietary risk over time, and assess the impact of where food is grown on residues and risk levels, as well as how production systems influence residues and risks (conventional versus organic). The DRI combines the results of United States and United Kingdom pesticide residue testing programs with data on food serving sizes and each pesticide’s chronic Reference Dose or Acceptable Daily Intake. Chronic DRI values are a ratio: the amount of residue in a serving of food relative to the maximum amount allowed by regulators. DRI values are a ratio: the amount of residue in a serving of food relative to the maximum amount allowed by regulators. Data generated by the DRI helps guide HHRA’s policy and public health by highlighting which food-pesticide combinations account for the most worrisome risks in the food supply. The DRI system initially reported aggregate values for a given food/pesticide combination. These values are derived from multiple individual samples of a food collected by regulatory agencies.  For these DRI values, each individual number represents many servings of a given food. In 2022, HHRA added additional functionality the the DRI to report dietary risk in individual samples of a given food. The paper “Tracking pesticide residues and risk levels in individual samples—insights and applications,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe in July 2022, describes the methodology and data sources used to calculate these individual sample DRI values, and highlights some of the results and what they can tell us about residue levels in the global food supply. This is the first analytical system worldwide to provide this level of insight into residues in food. As the paper reports, “dietary risk levels are highly skewed. A large number of samples pose moderate, low, or very-low risks, and relatively few samples pose high or very-high risks.” Thus, regulators and researchers can use the DRI to pinpoint where pesticide dietary risks needs to be mitigated. Like all of HHRA’s peer-reviewed publications, this paper is open access and available free of charge. Click here to view the full text. Access DRI data here.

An Update from HHRA

Aug 12th, 2022
We share an update on all things HHRA.

HHRA’s team has been making lots of progress in our important work at the intersection of food, farming, and health.

We started the spring/summer of with a bang as we brought HHRA on the road to the Public Health Conference of Iowa in May. At the same time, farmers across the Heartland were preparing  fields for planting and carrying out early weed management practices.  The end of spring into the early summer months (March-July) is the peak herbicide spray window in the Midwest, which in turn means sometimes higher exposures for families in the Heartland living near corn and soybean fields. Capturing data from our flagship project The Heartland Study during this window is essential to better understand how pregnant women in the Heartland may be impacted by herbicide exposures.

Heartland Study Progress

We have been successfully enrolling 15 or more pregnant participants each month into The Heartland Study for the past several months, with almost 300 Mother-Infant Pairs enrolled so far. Our newest study site at Gundersen Medical Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin should begin enrolling pregnant women in September. Welcome to the team, Gundersen!

We recently sent the first batch of Heartland Study urine samples to be evaluated by the Center for Toxicological Research (CTQ) in Quebec, Canada, our analytical partner for herbicide exposure assessments.

Use of dicamba has been on the rise since genetically engineered soybeans that are resistance to the herbicide were introduced in 2016.

To our knowledge, no one has run any urine sample tests with a method capable of quantifying low-levels of dicamba. A first batch of Heartland Study urine samples have been sent to our analytical lab, CTQ in Quebec, Canada. At HHRA’s request, the great team at CTQ has developed a new method that detects dicamba, 2,4-D and 11 other pesticide analytes in urine.

Our Heartland Study will include the first large-scale study of dicamba in human urine conducted anywhere in the world. Previously there was no practical, vetted method for quantifying dicamba in urine, which is why there are no data on dicamba in urine accessible to regulators or public-health scientists. This is a consequential data gap given that the use of dicamba has risen more rapidly in the last five years than any other herbicide. “The new dicamba method may be one of the most significant enhancements in herbicide analytical chemistry methods in decades,” says HHRA Executive Director Charles Benbrook.

Looking Ahead

Boston here we come! We are exited to be hosting a session at the American Public Health Association annual conference this November with some of our Alliance partners:

• Cynthia Curl: Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Population Science Director, Center for Excellence in Environmental Health & Safety, Boise State University
• Daniele Mandrioli, MD, PhD, Director Cesare Maltoni Cancer Research Center, Ramazzini Institute, Bologna, Italy
• Marlaina Freisthler, JD, MPH, George Washington University
• Philip Landrigan, MD, MSc, FAAP, Director, Global Observatory on Planetary Health, Boston College

The special 90-minute session during the APHA annual meeting will discuss recent advances in methods available to epidemiologists to assess linkages between herbicide use and exposures and adverse birth outcomes, reproductive problems and chronic illness. The experts will provide an overview of ongoing, prospective birth-cohort studies and toxicological investigations. The panel will describe how integration of research tools and insights from multiple disciplines can accelerate progress in understanding how herbicide exposures may impair sperm quality, reduce fertility, increase adverse reproductive outcomes, and trigger microbiome dysbiosis, neurodevelopmental deficits, and chronic disease. We hope to stress the importance and the need for new investments in biomonitoring and larger birth-cohort studies, coupled with developmental assessments of newborns and children through adolescence and into adult life.

We are looking forward to bringing our work to the broader public health community!

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