Pesticide manufacturing/formulation workers rather than farmers or applicators or people living with them are primarily exposed to organophosphorus pesticides (OPs). However, airborne concentrations in the workplace have rarely been determined. A total of 121 air samples (personal or area sampling) were collected at 4 factories where chlorpyrifos, EPN, parathion, and phorate, were manufactured/formulated from March through July, 2007-2008. Samples were collected by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) method and were analyzed by GC-MS. The geometric mean (GM) level of airborne chlorpyrifos was 0.17 mg/m 3 , 85% Korean Occupational Exposure Limit (KOEL) of 0.2 mg/m 3 , and at 95% confidence, airborne concentrations exceeded the KOEL 58.8% of the time or less, indicating that this concentration level was unacceptable according to exposure assessment using a LogNorm2 ® . However, compared with levels of TLV and/or PEL and/or WEL, the GM concentration levels of other OPs were remarkably low (range, 0.1-15.0%) and that these levels of concentrations to the other OPs were acceptable. The levels of airborne concentrations of OPs depended on isolation of the process; in other words, the levels depended on the extent to which the process was automated. The reason that the airborne concentration levels, except for those of chlorpyrifos, were very much lower than expected may be attributable to the fact that there was not exposed to 100% toxic active ingredients in pesticide formulation workplaces because of the use of supplemental agents or additives to produce complete pesticides. This study is limited since there were seldom or neither any data of previous studies to be compared with the study results nor dermal exposure data. The results were used to revise KOELs for OPs in 2010.
Parathion is an organophosphate pesticide being legally applied for the purpose of agriculture and is being manufactured in Korea. A gas chromatography/mass spectrometric method was developed for the determination of parathion urinary metabolite, p-nitrophenol. p-Nitrophenol was extracted from weak acidic urine, and then measured by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (selected ion monitoring). The recovery of pnitrophenol in the overall procedure was 88.2%. The detection limit of the assay was 1.0 μg/L based upon assayed urine of 2.0 mL. The method was applied to the determination of p-nitrophenol in urine of workers of a parathion industry. Spot urines of workers of a parathion industry were sampled at the end of shift and pnitrophenol was analyzed using above developed method. p-Nitrophenol could be detected in all of the urine samples at concentrations varying from 3.0 to 681 μg/L.
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