“Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took a major step to increase transparency by posting 10 years of pesticide incident data on its website. Sharing this information advances EPA’s commitment to environmental justice and aligns with EPA’s Equity Action Plan by expanding the availability of data and capacity so the public and community organizations can better understand pesticide exposures, including exposures to vulnerable populations.
This action also advances the President’s transparency goal of ensuring that the public, including members of communities with environmental justice concerns, has adequate access to information on federal activities related to human health or the environment, as charged in Executive Order 14096, Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All.
The data sets, which pull information from EPA’s Incident Data System (IDS), allow users to access raw data on pesticide exposure incidents such as the incident date, the reason for the report (e.g., adverse effect, product defect), and the severity of the incident. It may also provide information on the location of the incident, the pesticide product, and a description of the incident(s). EPA has not verified the raw data for accuracy or completeness, so users should be aware of this limitation before drawing any conclusions from the data….”