NEWS AND
INFORMATION for April 2010
In April of 2010, EPA mailed to State government agencies a letter
announcing the availability of the Ecological Pesticide Incident Reporting Portal at www.npic.orst.edu/eco.
Launched in October 2009, this online application was developed to facilitate the
reporting of ecological incidents from States and other organizations involved with the
investigation and documentation of ecological incidents. In addition to State agencies,
Federal Government organizations, tribes, academia, wildlife rehabilitation centers,
conservation societies, and beekeepers are welcomed to make use of this reporting portal.
Information related to ecological incidents submitted via the portal will be imported into
a database for use by risk assessors and risk managers in EPA's Office of Pesticide
Programs and considered the next time risks are assessed for the pesticide(s) involved in
the incident report. More complete data on ecological incidents will allow the Agency to
make better informed regulatory decisions, write better label statements, and impose
better risk mitigation measures. Additionally, incident data serve as early warning
information and can assist the Agency in discovering trends, which if left unnoticed,
could create problems.
Ecological incident data have been used in a variety of ways, including to justify,
modify, and/or refine precautionary statements on product labels; to support
implementation of risk mitigation strategies (e.g., spray drift buffers, spatial and/or
temporal use restrictions); to determine whether pesticides are being misused; to support
enforcement actions; to discover faulty pesticide containers; and to suspend or cancel
product registrations.
In 2008, EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) formed the Incident Data Workgroup to
improve the collection, management, and use of incident data by EPA in registering and
re-evaluating pesticides in the United States. As part of this effort, the workgroup is
working to collect more and better incident information. One type of incident on which the
workgroup wants to collect improved information is ecological incidents, which is defined
as occurrences of adverse field effects on nontarget wild animals and plants that are
known or suspected to be caused by pesticide use. Included in this definition are bird,
fish, and bee kills, and nontarget crop damage incidents.
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New Publication from National Center for Healthy Housing on "What's
Working for Bed Bug Control in Multifamily Housing" Reconconciling best
practices with research and the realities of implementation.
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Strategic Direction for New Pesticide Testing and Assessment
Approaches
To better protect human health and the environment, EPA has launched a new Web page that
explains the development and evaluation of new technologies in molecular, cellular, and
computational sciences to supplement or replace more traditional methods of toxicity
testing and risk assessment.
This Web page details the approach EPA's Pesticide Program is using to pursue new
technologies that predict and characterize potential human health and environmental
hazards and exposures from pesticides. It describes the current status as well as future
plans for this rapidly changing area of research and regulatory science. On this Web page
you will also find links to a glossary of key terms, information on pesticides and the
ToxCast(TM) Research Program, and a matrix of tools used for pesticide testing.
You can access this new Web page at http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/science/testing-assessment.html. |
