Source · category
Insecticides
Also: insecticide, pyrethroids, mosquito coil, bug spray, residual spraying
Products applied indoors to kill insects — sprays, coils, plug-in vaporisers, treated nets and residual surface treatments. They are among the few indoor sources applied deliberately to the air of an occupied room, and the residue outlasts the application by months.
Where it comes from indoors
Most indoor pollutants arrive as a by-product of doing something else. An insecticide is applied on purpose, to the room, while people live in it — which makes the application itself a short, intense exposure and the residue a long, low one.
Delivery decides which of the two dominates. An aerosol spray puts droplets into the air for minutes. A mosquito coil burns, adding combustion particles and carbon monoxide to the active substance. An electric vaporiser releases slowly for hours beside a sleeping person. A residual surface treatment is designed to stay active for months.
Then the compounds leave the air. Pyrethroids and organophosphates are semi-volatile: they partition onto dust and surfaces, where they persist far longer than in air and where a crawling child meets them. This is the practical reason that measuring only the air understates the exposure, and it is a question this vocabulary keeps explicitly open.
What the studies report
| Linked to | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | mean 315 | — · home | Children's Post-Pesticide Application Exposure Study: chlorpyrifos measured in the indoor air, on surfaces and on children's plush toys in ten homes before a professional crack-and-crevice application and over the two weeks after it, with the absorbed dose of the children estimated | F-1430 Valli Chlorpyrifos accumulation patterns for child-accessible surf… (2005) | machine |
| — | mean 115 | — · home | Children's Post-Pesticide Application Exposure Study: chlorpyrifos measured in the indoor air, on surfaces and on children's plush toys in ten homes before a professional crack-and-crevice application and over the two weeks after it, with the absorbed dose of the children estimated | F-1431 Valli Chlorpyrifos accumulation patterns for child-accessible surf… (2005) | machine |
| — | share-above 92 | — · home | intervention study in homes with high-toxicity insecticide use in New York City: professional placement of low-toxicity insecticides against a control group, with nine insecticides measured in two-week integrated indoor air samples before and after the intervention | F-1434 Bishop An Intervention to Reduce Residential Insecticide Exposure d… (2006) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | mean 999 | adult residents of Bamako in four occupational groups · home (bedroom) | personal exposure measurement study: residents of Bamako in four occupational groups (office workers, drivers, cooks, students) wore palm-sized optical PM2.5 sensors on the chest during daily activities, September 2020 to February 2021 | F-0122 Sidibe et al. Personal Exposure to Fine Particles (PM2.5) in Northwest Afr… (2022) | machine |
| — | share-above 78 | — · home | passive sampling study of indoor and outdoor exposure to chlorpyrifos and azinphos-methyl in farmworker and non-farmworker households near agricultural fields | F-1432 Gibbs Passive Sampling for Indoor and Outdoor Exposures to Chlorpy… (2017) | machine |
| — | share-above 89 | — · dwelling | measurement study of particle-phase pesticides in low-income social housing: 28 target pesticides sampled in 46 units, with pest management by the building and pesticide use by residents recorded | F-1433 Vaezafshar Widespread occurrence of pesticides in low-income housing (2024) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Insecticides. Coridum Knowledge G-0142, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0142/