Pesticides and food safety

Safe handling of pesticides plays an important role in protecting public health and the environment. The importance of these issues is determined, first of all, by the specificity of pesticides and their wide application in various areas and spheres of human activity: in agriculture, forestry, public utilities, in personally subsidiary plots, in everyday life, during storage and transportation of food products, etc. The features of pesticides are: the intentionality of their use, high biological activity, the ability to circulate in environmental objects for a long time and accumulate in them, including bioaccumulation in living organisms, the stability of a significant number of preparations and their active ingredients (AI), etc. That is why, all over the world, issues of regulating the handling of pesticides are governed by special regulations, directives and specifications, in many ways similar to the assessment and approval of drugs on the market. Their introduction into practice is preceded by long-term, multi-year research, assessments and examinations, mandatory registration tests of pesticides in real conditions of use and only then their state registration. System of ensuring the safety of food products obtained by using pesticides, tested in practice, including toxicological and hygienic assessment of pesticides, determination of hazard class, development of hygienic standards in food products and regulations for use (safety periods), monitoring of levels of actual contamination of food products, allows assessing their real danger (risk) for consumers, increase the effectiveness of current state sanitary and epidemiological supervision and ensure the prevention of violations of public health.

Contribution:
Rakitskii V.N. – concept and design, writing the text;
Chkhvirkiya E.G. – concept and design, writing the text.
All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment. The article was prepared within the framework of the Rospotrebnadzor industry program “Scientific substantiation of the national system for ensuring sanitary and epidemiological well-being, managing health risks and improving the quality of life of the population of Russia” (2021–2025).

Received: October 31, 2024 / Accepted: December 3, 2024 / Published: December 28, 2024