Abstract
The continuous monitoring of pesticide residues in our food, drinking water, environment and biosphere at large is needed for creating awareness for the trends of level of contamination and building up a data base upon which future plan could be decided. In this paper monitoring requirements regarding the instrumentations, valid sampling, analytical protocols and its purpose are discussed in detail. Twenty nine water samples were analyzed and 22 were found contaminated with detectable level of 5 pesticides. These samples were found contaminated in the range of 0.0005-0.054 g/L. The percentage of detection of Chlorpyriphos, Malathion, Dimethoate, Cypermethrin, and Endosulfan was respectively 7%, 14%, 17.8%, 35.8% and 25%. However, none of the samples were found above their Maximum Acceptable Concentrate (MAC) i.e. 0.1g/L and 0.5g/L for single and number of insecticides respectively set by EEC (European Economic Commission). Moreover, a survey of farmers’ perceptions in respect of effects on their health with pesticide exposure was conducted to find out farmers’ perception for the use of pesticides and how these may affect on their health with, identification of key issues those are relevant to farmers’ health for further training to increase farmer’s awareness about the use of pesticides.
