Abstract. Occupational exposure and risk assessment were conducted to evaluate the safety of operators when insecticide acetamiprid was applied to apple orchard using a speed sprayer. Dermal patches, cotton gloves, socks, and masks were used to monitor the dermal exposure, and personal air pump with solid sorbent was used to measure the potential inhalation exposure. In validation to analytical methods, the limit of detection and limit of quantitation were 0.25 ng and 1 ng, respectively. Good reproducibility (coefficient variation < 4%), linearity (coefficient determination > 0.999), and recovery (85.3-118.2%) were obtained. Trapping efficiency of solid sorbent was 96.4% while breakthrough did not occur. Only hand exposure was measured on the gloves during mixing/loading to give 33-1,132 μg. Exposure amount of operator 3 among 4 workers was noticeably high. The total volumes of spray liquid for operators were 535-1,235 mL·h -1 , corresponding to 0.03-0.08% of the applied spray solution. Highest contaminated parts of body were thighs, chest, and lower legs. The inhalation exposure ratio to the total application amount was significantly low. However, wind seemed to affect the inhalation exposure of operator. For risk assessment, margin of safety was calculated by the application of cloth and dermal penetration rate to obtain values of much larger than 1 in all cases. Therefore, health risk of operators during treatment of acetamiprid in apple orchard could be of least possibility.Additional key words: dermal exposure, inhalation exposure, margin of safety

Exposure and risk assessments were conducted to evaluate the relative safety of mixing/loading work of indoxacarb between wettable powder (WP) and water dispersible granule (WG). Hand exposure was monitored using cotton gloves while inhalation exposure was measured using personal air monitor. Method validation for the exposure monitoring was established successfully through several experiments. Limit of determination and limit of quantitation were 0.25 and 1 ng, respectively. R 2 of calibration curve linearity was more than 0.9999 and reproducibility was 0.7-6. Recovery of indoxacarb from gloves, solid sorbent and glass fiber filter at three different levels was 81.5-108.8%. Trapping efficiency and breakthrough tests gave 981.5-108.8% of recovery. During mixing/loading procedure, hand exposure amount (75 percentile of 30 repetitions) for indoxacarb WP was 6 folds (459.8 mg/kg a.i) than that of WG (81.4 mg/kg a.i). This result indicates that WG has less drift than WP thanks to its granular type of formulation. Inhalation amount was 10 −8 -10 −7 % of spray mixture prepared and 10 −4 -10 −3 % of hand exposure. In inhalation case, no significant differences were observed between two formulations. Margin of safety was calculated for risk assessment using male Korean average body weight and acceptable operator exposure level as the important exposure factors. Mixing/ loading procedures for both of the formulations were considered to be of least risk because calculated MOS values were more than 1.