Background:
Italy was the first Western country to be heavily affected by COVID-19. Healthcare workers (HCWs) were exposed to a high risk of occupational infection, partially due to insufficient ...personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies. This study aimed to describe the practices, availability, training, confidence in PPE use and the adverse effects due to extended PPE use, as reported by HCWs in Italy. We also aimed to provide a comparison between Italian data and those from other countries.
Methods:
This study was a secondary analysis of a previously published international study, the PPE-SAFE Survey, conducted in April 2020. Data were analysed from the original study database.
Results:
We analysed the responses from 380 healthcare workers based in Italy, out of the 2711 respondents to the international survey. Among the Italian respondents, FFP2 and FFP3 respirators or equivalent were the most used masks for routine tasks (respectively 188/380, 50%; and 163/380, 43%). The median time of wearing PPE without taking a break was 5 h interquartile range (IQR) 4–6, with statistically significant difference from other countries median 4 h (IQR 2–5) p < 0.0001. In Italy, 249 out of 380 (65%) HCWs had never performed a formal fit test for a N95 mask or equivalent and 91/380 (24%) never had a partner for donning and doffing procedures. Most of the respondents (299/380, 79%) had received formal training in PPE use at any time.
Conclusion:
Most of the surveyed Italian HCWs reported working at above usual capacity, long shifts with PPE without breaks and routine use in intensive care unit of aerosol protection (e.g. FFP2/FFP3), hazmat suits and face shields/visors. The correct adherence to safety procedures (e.g. donning/doffing in pairs, performing fit test) has substantial scope for improvement in the future.
•We present the decision support system ValorE for livestock manure management.•Manure production, storage, treatment and land application domains are included.•Users and stakeholders can carry out ...comparative analysis at farm or territorial scale.•Different scenarios can be described by multidisciplinary indicators and by maps.•It is a complete tool for improving both farm strategy and decision making process.
Intensive agriculture and livestock breeding represent critical factors in the Lombardy region since the nitrate vulnerable zones are 62% of utilised agricultural plain area. The aim of reducing the environmental risk caused by agriculture activities (e.g. nitrogen losses into groundwater and atmosphere) can be only achieved through a critical and scientific analysis of livestock manure management in a whole-farm perspective. Keeping in mind this objective, the decision support system (DSS) ValorE was developed. It can be described as a tool able to evaluate from the environmental, technical, agronomic and economic points of view the main components of manure management (production, storage, treatment and land application) for a variety of livestock types (i.e., cattle, swine, poultry, sheep, goats and horses), under different scenarios adopted at farm and territorial scale. ValorE consists of three main components: data management subsystem, model management subsystem and two versions of user-interface, both for farm and territorial scale. Most of the inputs to the DSS comes from external databases, while a software tool developed in the .NET environment and implemented using object oriented programming (C# language), provides the logic to manage the scenario simulation of agronomic and environmental farm-scale models. Users and stakeholders can carry out comparative analysis, starting from the knowledge of the current perspective, in terms of manure management system at farm or territorial scale by interrogating the available databases. Moreover, they can generate different alternative scenarios thanks to different options for the manure handling and cropping system simulation. Then they can finally evaluate and compare different scenarios through multidisciplinary and synthetic indicators but also visualise spatial effects exploiting the coupled webGIS. ValorE is therefore an attempt to offer a comprehensive tool for improving both farm strategy and decision making process, which is particularly important in a very intensive agricultural area, with one of the highest livestock density in the world, as Lombardy.
Achieving a change towards the sustainable use and management of pesticides requires a multiple perspective approach that combines traditional knowledge, experience of different local stakeholders, ...scientific expertise, and context-specific data to provide useful and understandable information for the target farmers. In this paper, the incorporation of the information on environmental and social dimensions into a “science-based” pesticide management practice is presented as an example of a replicable multidisciplinary approach. This approach depicts the importance of the context-specific scenario analysis and of the involvement of farmers starting from their practices and their knowledge. A diverse range of engagement initiatives have been adopted to consult, inform, and involve the community. Tools as target guidelines of good practices, self-evaluation checklists, and a user-friendly indicator that considers social, environmental, and territorial parameters of the specific area, gained a lot of interest and trust and have proven to be useful in disseminating the methodology of environmental risk assessment to farmers, supporting and assisting them in the comparison of different phytosanitary strategies at farm scale to identify weaknesses in their current pesticide management at farm level and to find corresponding corrective actions. The experience also highlighted the importance of the role of properly trained and informed advisors.
Chemical mixtures in the environment are of increasing concern in the scientific community and regulators. Indeed, evidence indicates that aquatic wildlife and humans can be simultaneously and ...successively exposed to multiple chemicals mainly originating from different anthropic sources by direct uptake from water and indirectly via eating aquatic organisms. This study analyses a large set of sampling data referring to the entire Lombardy region, the most industrialised and at the same time the most important agriculture area in Italy, investigating the presence and potential effects of chemical mixtures in surface water bodies. We enriched and further developed an approach based on a previous work, where the overall mixture toxicity was evaluated for three representative aquatic organisms (algae, Daphnia, fish) using the concentration addition model to combine exposure with ecotoxicological data. The calculation of the mixture toxicity has been realised for two scenarios, namely best- and worst-case scenarios. The former considered only quantified compounds in the monitoring campaign, while the latter also included substances with concentrations below the limit of quantification (LoQ). Differences between the two scenario results established the potential toxicity range. Our findings revealed that differences were minimal when the calculated toxicity in the best-case scenario indicated potential risk and, on the contrary, they suggest that the worst-case scenario is overly conservative; we could also state that including substances with concentrations below the LoQ when calculating the overall toxicity of the mixture is useless and then we focused solely on the best-case scenario. The analysis of spatial and temporal risk trends together with contaminant types and target organisms highlighted specific clusters of contamination. Finally, in several cases, our study found that only few compounds were responsible for the majority of mixture toxicity.
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•A method was developed to evaluate the risk of chemical mixtures to water organisms.•The entire Lombardy Region in Northern Italy was used as a case study.•Land use facilitates the understanding of priority mixture compositions.•Acute toxicity of mixtures is largely driven by only one or very few compounds.
In the last decades, several monitoring programs were established as an effect of EU Directives addressing the quality of water resources (drinking water, groundwater and surface water). Plant ...Protection Products (PPPs) are an obvious target of monitoring activities, since they are directly released into the environment. One of the challenges in managing the risk of pesticides at the territorial scale is identifying the locations in water bodies needing implementation of risk mitigation measures. In this, the national pesticides monitoring plans could be very helpful. However, monitoring of pesticides is a challenging task because of the high number of registered pesticides, cost of analyses, and the periodicity of sampling related to pesticide application and use. Extensive high-quality data-sets are consequently often missing. More in general, the information that can be obtained from monitoring studies are frequently undervalued by risk managers. In this study, we propose a new methodology providing indications about the need to implement mitigation measures in stretches of surface water bodies on a territory by combining historical series of monitoring data and GIS. The methodology is articulated in two distinct phases: a) acquisition of monitoring data and setting-up of informative layers of georeferenced data (phase 1) and b) statistical and expert analysis for the identification of areas where implementation of limitation or mitigation measures are suggested (phase 2). Our methodology identifies potentially vulnerable water bodies, considering temporal contamination trends and relative risk levels at selected monitoring stations. A case study is presented considering glyphosate monitoring data in Lombardy Region (Northern of Italy) for the 2008–2014 period.
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•How to identify the need of pesticide risk mitigation actions for surface waters.•Territorial analysis coupled with expert judgement.•Decision support tool for public risk assessors•Environmental awareness
New modeling approaches that include the use of GIS are under development in order to allow a more realistic assessment of environmental contamination by pesticides. This paper reports a regional ...GIS-based risk assessment using a software tool able to simulate complex and real crop rotations at the regional scale. A single pesticide leaching assessment has been done. The mean annual pesticide concentration in leachate has been analyzed using both stochastic and deterministic approaches. The outputs of these simulations were mapped over the sampling locations of the regional pesticide monitoring program, demonstrating that GIS-based risk assessment can be used to establish new monitoring programs. A multiple pesticide leaching assessment for analyzing the risk related to pest control strategies in six different maize-based rotations has been carried out. Additive toxic units approach has been used. Crop rotation allows to mediate the risk related to pesticide use because forces the use of different compounds with different fate and toxicology properties.
In Italy, the National Environmental Protection Agency (ISPRA) publishes annual reports containing the results of monitoring programs for pesticides in surface and groundwater. These programs were ...established to accomplish the EU Directives addressing the quality of water resources (drinking water, groundwater and surface water) such as the Water Framework Directive or the Directive on the Sustainable Use of Pesticides. These data can be extremely helpful for risk management actions as they can provide indications where to implement mitigation measures at the territorial scale. In this study, we extrapolated the monitoring data (period 2008–2017) of terbuthylazine and its metabolite desethyl-terbuthylazine in the surface water bodies of the Po plain (Northern Italy).
Then, these data were utilized to apply a methodology based on a previous work proposed and published by our research team, which combine, in two distinct phases, historical series of monitoring data and GIS.
Overall, the results allowed to identify three areas where to focus risk mitigation measures, which correspond to the low part of the Lombardy (Lodi, Cremona and Mantua area), the area between the Padua and Venice provinces in Veneto and the area of Ferrara in Emilia Romagna.
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•Identification of vulnerable water bodies to pesticide•Use of large dataset of pesticide monitoring data•Identification of the trend of contamination risk by pesticide•Large scale analysis focused on the entire Po Plain, Northern Italy•Identified three main areas of concern in three regions out of five
The groundwater VULnerability to PESticide software system (VULPES) is a user-friendly, GIS-based and client–server software developed to identify vulnerable areas to pesticides at regional level ...making use of pesticide fate models. It is a Decision Support System aimed to assist the public policy makers to investigate areas sensitive to specific substances and to propose limitations of use or mitigation measures. VULPES identify the so-called Uniform Geographical Unit (UGU) which are areas characterised by the same agro-environmental conditions. In each UGU it applies the PELMO model obtaining the 80th percentile of the substance concentration at 1metre depth; then VULPES creates a vulnerability map in shapefile format which classifies the outputs comparing them with the lower threshold set to the legal limit concentration in groundwater (0.1μg/l).
This paper describes the software structure in details and a case study with the application of the terbuthylazine herbicide on the Lombardy region territory. Three zones with different degrees of vulnerabilities has been identified and described.
•Groundwater vulnerability to pesticides can be identified by applying spatial modelling.•A software system is proposed to evaluate potential groundwater vulnerability to pesticides.•Environmental and pesticide data are pre-loaded into the system.•Results can be used to evaluate limitations in use of pesticides or further investigations.
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