Pesticides.

Abstract

1. Chemical treatment of crops is essential not only to reduce losses but also to prevent certain food related diseases. 2. Pesticides, unlike many other compounds, are designed to kill higher organisms and thus pose special toxicological problems. 3. It is important to understand the mechanism of action of the pesticide in the target organism in order to assess risk/benefit as accurately as possible. 4. In future the need for pharmacokinetic/dynamic and comparative metabolic data will increase and it will become important to gather human exposure data for certain commonly used compounds, data which are sadly lacking at present.