PESTICIDES: BENEFITS AND HAZARDS

Pesticides are an integral part of modern life used to prevent growth of unwanted living organisms. Despite the fact that scientific statements coming from many toxicological works provide indication on the low risk of the pesticides and their residues, the community especially last years is deeply concerned about massive application of pesticides in diverse fields. Therefore evaluation of hazard risks particularly in long term perspective is very important. In the fact there are at least two clearly different approaches for evaluation of pesticide using: the first one is defined as an objective or probabilistic risk assessment, while the second one is the potential economic and agriculture benefits. Therefore, in this review the author has considered scientifically based assessment of positive and negative effects of pesticide application and discusses possible approaches to find balance between them.