Beijing--Sino-US Work Shop on Pesticide Risk Assessment was held in Beijing on June 25-26, 2012. A total of 18 experts and technicians attended the Workshop, including representatives from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the China Agricultural University (CAU), the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and the Institute for the Control of Agrochemicals, Ministry of Agriculture (
ICAMA). ICAMA Deputy Director-General Ye Jiming attended and addressed the Workshop.
Ye pointed out in his speech that remarkable achievements have been made in exchange and cooperation between China and U.S. over the past four years, which has greatly promoted the improvement of pesticide risk assessment technology and tools. The Regulations on the Management of Pesticides, which is under revision now, requires that risk assessment mechanism be incorporated into pesticide registration and management, Ye stressed. He hoped that both sides will take the Workshop as an opportunity to further deepen cooperation and reinforce each other in researches on pesticide risk assessment.
At the Workshop, the Chinese side briefed the latest progress in experiments on measuring pesticide exposure during application pesticides and indoor density of mosquito coil-smoke. Both sides demonstrated their models for exposure assessment of public health insecticides. The two sides had an in-depth and heated discussion about categorization of exposure scenarios during pesticide application, assessment methods for the exposure of public health insecticides and data requirements for pesticide toxicology. After the meeting, the delegates participated in a field experiment of measuring pesticide exposure during application in Zhejiang Province and conducted further discussions.
In recent years, China has made steady progress in pesticide health risk assessment thanks to the China-U.S. pesticide management project, the Project of Co-financing Research for Risk Assessment from Pesticides under the framework of the National Special Research Fund for Non-Profit Sector and the Project of Safe Application of Pesticides and Ecological Risk Assessment under the framework of the National Key Technology R&D Program contained in the "Twelfth Five-year Plan for Science and Technology Development". China has already established preliminary procedures for the risk assessment of occupational exposure to pesticides and health risk assessment for public health insecticides, methods for measuring pesticide exposure during application, models for assessing exposure of mosquito-repellent incense, which provide technological guarantee for further improving science-based pesticides management in China.
(Source: Toxicology Division, ICAMA)