Pesticides are the chemicals applied to increase the yield and quality of agricultural crops. There is no doubt that these deadly chemicals increase the production of crops and also improve the quality of produce but on other hand if these toxic chemicals are indiscriminately used on the crops, their residues not only become the part of our diet but also have negative effects on our body systems. The toxic residues of chlorpyrifos have the tendency to cause acute and chronic toxicity in humans. Keeping in view the importance of this human health issue current project was designed to evaluate the residue levels of chlorpyrifos in peach and also to study the effect of residues on physical characteristics of peaches.
In current study the focused area were 8 peach orchards randomly selected from district Swat (KPK). The samples were evaluated for physical characteristic (black spots and diameter). Black spots were counted by the tip of the pencil and diameter was measured through Vernier calipers. Significant results were found among the orchards for black spot and diameter.
Then each sample was chopped and taken in Erlenmeyer flask along with ethyl acetate and sodium chloride before placing in water for shaking. After shaking the mixture was filtered through ordinary filter paper with anhydrous sodium sulfate. The filtrate was taken in beaker and dried by injection of nitrogen gas. One mL acetonitrile was added to the dried extract for reconstitution and shacked on vortex mixture and filtered through 0.22 μm polyamide filter paper into Val. Finally the prepared samples were injected to HPLC.
The obtained data was analyzed by Microsoft excel and SPSS version 20.00. Majority of the samples of the samples were contaminated from chlorpyrifos residues, which were 75 % in which 65.62 % were below the safe limit standard established by (WHO/FAO) and 9.37 % of the
Summery
52
samples were having chlorpyrifos residues above the safe limit of WHO and FAO. 25 % were totally free from chlorpyrifos residues. The effect of washing on peach skins were satisfactory which reduced 68.74 % of chlorpyrifos residues, washing of peach pulps were more effective which reduced the chlorpyrifos residues up to 83.84 % and peeling effect was also good in reducing the chlorpyrifos residues which reduced the level of residues 74 %.
The study on its completion concluded that majority of the peach orchards in the study area have the organophosphate residues in the fruits and its derivatives at the permissible levels while some of the orchards do possess non-permissible levels of residue which can be potentially hazardous to end consumers. Hence it is strongly counselled for the consumers to properly wash and peal the peaches before consumption and the farmers need to avoid indiscriminate use of pesticides so as to avoid any unpleasant events due to pesticides poisoning.