For a lot of, spring heralds contemporary air and train on the golf course. However do gamers threat publicity to unsafe ranges of pesticides used to beautify and keep a golf course’s inexperienced grass? To search out out, researchers requested volunteers to play 18 holes on a simulated course sprayed with widespread pesticides. They report the ends in ACS Agricultural Science & Expertise, saying there’s possible restricted trigger for concern over poisonous publicity from pesticide-treated turf.
There are many research on pesticide publicity amongst individuals who have a tendency and harvest crops grown in handled environments. However John M. Clark and colleagues could not discover a lot comparable details about people who play sports activities, together with soccer and golf, within the nice outside. So, his workforce designed a research to research golfers’ potential dangers from 4 pesticides, which have low volatilities and comparatively low toxicities for people, and are generally used on golf course turfgrass: cyfluthrin (insecticide), chlorothalonil (fungicide), MCPP-p (herbicide) and a couple of,4-D (herbicide).
For the research, the researchers created what they deemed a “worst-case-scenario” 18-hole course: All areas of a simulated golf course have been handled with the producers’ recommended most quantity of all 4 pesticides. Then they recruited eight volunteer golfers to play a full spherical on the handled turf one hour after pesticide utility and to stay on the course for 4 hours. To measure pesticide publicity, 4 of the volunteers wore cotton full-body fits with veils, socks and gloves that might decide up contact residues and private air samplers that might seize airborne residues. The opposite 4 volunteers wore cut-off cotton fits over their very own {golfing} garments and submitted urine samples after the spherical.
After the volunteers completed {golfing}, Clark’s workforce measured pesticide residues on the dosimetry fits and air samplers and located that the hand and decrease leg segments picked up essentially the most residue whereas airborne residues contributed little to publicity. The researchers additionally measured the volunteers’ publicity threat from the degrees of pesticides discovered on the fits and within the urine samples by calculating the hazard quotient (HQ). The workforce discovered that the HQ values from the golfers’ publicity indicated little threat to the 4 pesticides used on this research.
Lastly, Clark and colleagues in contrast the insecticide cyfluthrin outcomes to their 2008 Journal of Agricultural and Meals Chemistry research with older, neurotoxic pesticides on the similar simulated golf course web site — and utilizing the identical protocols. Each research’ HQ values have been properly beneath 1.0, the extent that signifies probably unsafe publicity. Nevertheless, within the prior work, the volunteers’ urinalysis HQ values of 0.0318 and 0.054 for chlorpyrifos and carbaryl, respectively, have been an order of magnitude larger than the volunteers’ urinalysis HQ of 0.0043 from this 2024 research with the insecticide cyfluthrin. The researchers say this comparability exhibits the potential good thing about utilizing fashionable, decrease volatility and fewer poisonous pesticides, which may additional cut back golfers’ threat of opposed results from publicity.
The authors acknowledge funding from the US Golf Affiliation and the New England Regional Turf Basis.
