Pesticides in People: Measuring Exposure

For decades epidemiologists assessing the impacts of pesticides on public health outcomes, pregnancy, and children’s neurodevelopment have struggled to construct accurate measures of exposure from publicly available pesticide use data.

HHRA recognizes it is time to move beyond indirect measures of exposure by measuring the levels of pesticides in human biofluids and tissues, and especially urine, blood, and placenta.

This kind of Biomonitoring is the best way to generate reliable data on pesticide exposure levels. For this reason, HHRA is compiling the largest-ever longitudinal dataset compiled in the US on levels of pesticides in the urine of pregnant women.

Biomonitoring entails two essential steps:

• Locating and securing access to samples to test, and
• Utilizing sensitive, reliable analytical methods to quantify the concentration of pesticide analytes in biofluid and tissue samples.

We are committed to advancing progress in both of these essential pillars of biomonitoring by measuring levels of major pesticides in both Heartland Study samples collected by our research team, and frozen, stored urine samples from previous research projects.

In partnership with our analytical lab partner, the Center for Toxicological Research, HHRA has developed a new analytical method that detects 13 pesticide analytes, including two herbicides that are a focus of our Heartland Study (dicamba and 2,4-D).

This new method is substantially reducing the total cost of urine testing in the Heartland Study, saving close to one-half million dollars over 2,000 mother-infant pairs. The availability of this new method will do the same for other teams of scientists assessing possible linkages between changing exposures to pesticides and public health outcomes.

For more biomonitoring data from HHRA and other researchers see:

• Herbicides in Urine
• HHRA’s sponsored special session at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Public Health Association
• Paper on the association of 2,4-D herbicide use and the frequency of detectable levels in urine
• The nuMom2b Nested Case Control Study
• Biomonitoring papers in HHRA’s bibliography