Pesticide exposure

Philip Villanueva and I are presently writing a paper that reviews the effect of using blended residue measurements called composite residues (e.g. measurements based on a blend of 10 apples) in place of using single item residue measurements. We also evaluate the utility of a program, Maximum Likelihood Imputation Procedure (MaxLIP), in obtaining the underlying single item residue measurements based on a composite measurements and the utility of this software in exposure estimation.

We use empirical data sets collected by the US Department of Agriculture that have both composite and single item residue measurements. Each set of data, composite and single item, are used in a simple risk assessment with the exposure estimation software, CARES. We then consider the utility of MaxLIP in improving the estimation of composite residues to estimate the single item residue distribution.