Pesticides

Although the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a system for collecting, reviewing, and acting on cases of human exposure to pesticides and the agency has taken action in response to some incident data, the system does not ensure that EPA always has enough information to decided whether steps are necessary to protect public health. Further, EPA may not always be appropriately responding to all cases of illness caused by pesticides. Better, more complete data on pesticide incidents would be helpful for EPA in protecting public health. EPA has started to improve its collection and analysis of data, and its work group continues to identify additional areas for improvement. GAO supports these efforts because they should lead to better management of data on incidents. Similarly, EPA's proposed 6(a)(2) rule should improve the quality of data submitted by registrants.

GAO found that: (1) EPA has collected pesticide exposure data from pesticide registrants and public and private entities since the 1970s and, in 1992, it implemented a computerized system to organize and track such data; (2) EPA has not assigned full-time staff to data collection and processing; therefore, the system has a data entry backlog, which limits its effectiveness; (3) EPA acted in 19 instances between 1989 and 1994 to protect the public from pesticide risks; (4) EPA often cannot assess whether a pesticide poses an unacceptable health risk, since incident reports frequently lack key data, may not be representative, or are not submitted; (5) an EPA work group is developing a long-term plan to collect and manage exposure data, but it has yet to develop a plan for putting the most cost-effective improvements into effect; (6) to improve the number and quality of exposure reports, EPA has proposed a rule that requires pesticide registrants to submit more detailed data on exposure incidents and clarifies the registrants' responsibilities; (7) EPA is determining the feasibility of having registrants who submit large numbers of reports to submit them electronically; and (8) the current exposure monitoring system includes data on both agricultural and nonagricultural pesticides, since EPA collects and processes the same information for those chemicals.