This report summarizes my experiences as a United States Public Health Service (PHS) environmental scientist working jointly with the Washington, DC based offices of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), the Federal Environmental Justice Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJ/IWG) and the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (EPA/OCSPP). This field experience was in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Public Health Program at Kansas State University. During the summer 2015 semester, I worked alongside representatives from the USDA, FDA, OEJ (EJ/IWG), and EPA establishing occupational and residential fumigant risk assessment template guidelines, while working with the (OEJ) and the (EJ/IWG) concerning new environmental justice laws and protocols as they pertain to predominately minority residential community pesticide exposure concerns.
During this joint governmental agency project, while under the supervision of Bill Smith (US/EPA Health Effects Division), I worked with Jeff Dawson (EPA/OCSP/OEJ) and Spencer Walse (USDA-Agricultural Science Dept.) refining the EPA occupational and residential exposure assessment template while addressing the fumigant exposure and spray drift issues as they pertain to predominately minority communities located in and around fumigation sites (agricultural fields, packing houses and shipping ports). The purposes of this research in Washington, DC included learning about (1) occupational and residential exposure, (2) how to conduct an assessment that deals with pesticides use (in particular, fumigants in soil, on commodities, and in packing material), and (3) indoor pest deterrents. A second objective was to incorporate into the assessment template practical and legally enforceable language for the protection of the general public during spray drift activities.
The results of this project lead to a new occupational and residential risk assessment template that incorporated input from USDA, FDA, OEJ and (EJ/IWG) and directly implemented fumigant modeling and spray drift (pesticide application methods that use high volume spray equipment) calculations and language addressing potential environmental justice issues protecting agricultural and industrial port based communities. This template can now be used for chemical specific risk assessments agency wide.
