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General protection goals for the environmental risk assessment (ERA) of plant protection products are stated in European legislation but specific protection goals (SPGs) are often not precisely defined. These are however crucial for designing appropriate risk assessment schemes. The process followed by the Panel on Plant Protection Products and their Residues (PPR) of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as well as examples of resulting SPGs obtained so far for environmental risk assessment (ERA) of pesticides is presented. The ecosystem services approach was used as an overarching concept for the development of SPGs, which will likely facilitate communication with stakeholders in general and risk managers in particular. It is proposed to develop SPG options for 7 key drivers for ecosystem services (microbes, algae, non target plants (aquatic and terrestrial), aquatic invertebrates, terrestrial non target arthropods including honeybees, terrestrial non-arthropod invertebrates, and vertebrates), covering the ecosystem services that could potentially be affected by the use of pesticides. These SPGs need to be defined in 6 dimensions: biological entity, attribute, magnitude, temporal and geographical scale of the effect, and the degree of certainty that the specified level of effect will not be exceeded. In general, to ensure ecosystem services, taxa representative for the key drivers identified need to be protected at the population level. However, for some vertebrates and species that have a protection status in legislation, protection may be at the individual level. To protect the provisioning and supporting services provided by microbes it may be sufficient to protect them at the functional group level. To protect biodiversity impacts need to be assessed at least at the scale of the watershed/landscape.

01 januari 2011, Contains fulltext : 95791.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access), Since guidelines on antibiotic drug treatment often focus on appropriate first choice drugs, assessment of guideline adherence should only concentrate on the first drug prescribed, and not on subsequent antibiotics prescribed after failure of the first one. PURPOSE: To determine a valid cut-off point for a definition of "first" or "new" prescription in indicators for the assessment of the quality of antibiotic drug treatment on the basis of pharmaceutical data. METHODS: Three possible definitions for the term "new prescription" were compared, based on three different periods of time, viz. more than 35, 28, or 21 days after starting a previous antibiotic. In an observational study, 1,225 antimicrobial prescriptions from the medical files of five family practices were audited ("clinical classification") and compared with a classification based on the three definitions ("technical classification"). Agreement between these clinical and technical classifications was determined by calculating Cohen's kappa. The technical classification was analyzed as a diagnostic test, using the clinical classification as the gold standard, and sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratios, and post-test probabilities were calculated. RESULTS: Defining "new prescription" as "more than 35 days after a previous prescription was issued" resulted in a Cohen's kappa of 0.93 (95% CI 0.92-0.98). The diagnostic value of this definition was extremely high, with a sensitivity of 0.976, specificity of 0.987, positive likelihood ratio of 77.7, and negative likelihood ratio of 0.02. CONCLUSION: We recommend using a cut-off value of 35 days since the last antimicrobial prescription as the definition of a "new prescription" when no diagnostic information is available, i.e., when using pharmaceutical data to assess the quality of antibiotic prescribing behavior.

Poster met onderzoeksinformatie over de ontwikkeling van het CASCADE-TOXSWA model, waarmee concentraties, van bijvoorbeeld gewasbeschermingsmiddelen, in een afwateringssysteem bepaald kunnnen worden

Poster met onderzoeksinformatie over de verbetering van FOCUS grondwater scenario's en modellen.

Poster met onderzoeksinformatie over het ontwikkelen van een Nederlands model voor de pesticidenconcentraties waaraan aquatische organismen blootgesteld worden.

Poster met onderzoeksinformatie naar het risico van gewasbeschermingsmiddelen voor bodemorganismen

If lower tiers in the assessment of pesticide leaching to groundwater indicate a risk, notifiers submit often lysimeter leaching studies with one soil type to demonstrate that leaching is no problem in reality. Many EU Member States use measured lysimeter leachate concentrations directly for decision making. It is questionable whether this is acceptable

Posterpresentation. The existing guidance for exposure assessment of soil organisms for the registration of plant protection products at EU level is not state of the art. A number of EU member states (including the Netherlands) have asked the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to improve this guidance

Poster presentation. In the FOCUS Surface Water Scenarios, an important entry route for plant protection products (PPP) into the water course is run-off from the adjacent field. Not much is known on the effect of run-off on the concentration in the FOCUS stream

Poster presenting a model for preferential flow of water that was developed (i.e. part of the water flow model SWAP). Main assumption is that the macropores in the soil can be divided into a bypass domain and an internal catchment domain