Pesticides

Food Consumption Data of Little Value to Estimate Some Exposures Gao ID: RCED-91-125 May 22, 1991

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the reliability of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) exposure estimates for safe pesticide levels and its reduced sample size, focusing on the adequacy of the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) 1987-88 food consumption survey data for EPA to estimate maximum dietary exposure to pesticide residues in food.

GAO found that: (1) budget constraints caused the reduction of the 1987-88 survey sample size by about one-third of the 30,770 individuals USDA surveyed in 1977-78; (2) survey limitations raised questions about its usefulness even for large subpopulations; (3) EPA did not participate in the 1987-88 survey's sampling design; (4) EPA ability to adequately base tolerance assessments on exposure estimates for the five smallest subpopulations may have been compromised, since the sampling error for these groups ranged from nearly 70 percent to 175 percent of the estimate; (5) EPA did not determine precision levels for exposure estimates based on 1977-78 survey data; and (6) EPA based its tolerance decisions, in part, on exposure estimates that may have lacked the precision necessary for setting tolerances.

Recommendations

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