: Development of an Icon-Based Questionnaire for Measuring Life Exposure to Pesticides in Children

Children of agriculture workers have a higher risk of exposure to pesticides compared to the general population because of close proximity of their homes to fields where pesticides are applied and from take-home exposure. Moreover, children are at greater risk for exposure to toxicants than adults because they demonstrate behaviors that lead to greater exposure opportunities, such as crawling on the floor and hand-to-mouth-behavior. We have developed an icon-based questionnaire to obtain a qualitative measure of potential exposure across a child's lifespan. The questionnaire employs visual markers on a calendar to stimulate recall by the child's parents about where they have lived and occupational and residential pesticide use throughout the child's lifetime. Parents from two groups of children, families living in an urban community and families living in an agriculture community, completed the questionnaire. Families from the agricultural community had significantly higher scores on the questionnaire than families from the urban community (4.1 vs. .54; p<.001). Participants currently living in an urban community reported significantly less time living in agricultural zones over the children's lifetime than those living in an agricultural community (p<.001) and parent's lifetime history of working in agriculture was also less in families currently living in an urban community than people living in an agricultural community (p<.001). This establishes a qualitative measure of potential lifetime exposure that can be associated with other exposure measurements, such as pesticide and metabolites levels in urine and dust, to provide a quantitative measure of potential exposure risk over an individual's lifetime.