Download or read book Science and Decisions written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2009-03-24 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis. However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment. Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.

Download or read book Assessing the Human Health Risks of Trichloroethylene written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2007-01-08 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trichloroethylene is a chlorinated solvent widely used as a degreasing agent in industrial and manufacturing settings. It is also used as a chemical intermediate in making other chemicals and is a component of products such as typewriter correction fluid, paint removers, adhesives, and spot removers. In 2001, EPA issued a draft health risk assessment and proposed exposure standards for trichloroethylene. PA's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) reviewed the draft and it was issued for public comment. A number of scientific issues were raised during the course of these reviews. Assessing the Human Health Risks of Trichloroethylene identifies and assesses the key scientific issues relevant to analyzing the human health risks of trichloroethylene, considering pertinent toxicologic, epidemiologic, population susceptibility, and other available information, including relevant published scientific literature, EPA's 2001 draft health risk assessment of trichloroethylene, scientific and technical comments received by EPA from public and private sources, and additional relevant information to be provided by the sponsoring agencies. This report highlights issues critical to the development of an objective, realistic, and scientifically balanced trichloroethylene health risk assessment. Guidance for hazard characterization of trichloroethylene is presented in Chapters 2 through 10. Chapter 2 provides guidance for evaluating large sets of epidemiologic data. In Chapter 3, the committee applies this guidance as an example in its evaluation of the epidemiologic data on trichloroethylene and kidney cancer, and this example should help guide evaluations of other cancer risks. Chapter 3 also assesses new information on the kidney toxicity of trichloroethylene and its metabolites and potential modes of action. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 evaluate the key issues regarding liver toxicity and cancer, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, respiratory tract toxicity and cancer, and immunotoxicity, respectively. However, the committee's review focused on mode-of-action information to understand how trichloroethylene might affect certain processes differently in different species. Chapter 9 discusses susceptibility to trichloroethylene and its metabolites, and Chapter 10 describes important factors in considering trichloroethylene in mixtures. Physiologically based pharmacokinetic models are evaluated in Chapter 11, and guidance is provided on future directions for model development. Finally, Chapter 12 considers issues related to dose-response assessment and quantitative assessment of risk.

Download or read book Toxicological Effects of Methylmercury written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-09-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercury is widespread in our environment. Methylmercury, one organic form of mercury, can accumulate up the aquatic food chain and lead to high concentrations in predatory fish. When consumed by humans, contaminated fish represent a public health risk. Combustion processes, especially coal-fired power plants, are major sources of mercury contamination in the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering regulating mercury emissions from those plants. Toxicological Effects of Methylmercury reviews the health effects of methylmercury and discusses the estimation of mercury exposure from measured biomarkers, how differences between individuals affect mercury toxicity, and appropriate statistical methods for analysis of the data and thoroughly compares the epidemiological studies available on methylmercury. Included are discussions of current mercury levels on public health and a delineation of the scientific aspects and policy decisions involved in the regulation of mercury. This report is a valuable resource for individuals interested in the public health effects and regulation of mercury. The report also provides an excellent example of the implications of decisions in the risk assessment process for a larger audience.

Download or read book Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public depends on competent risk assessment from the federal government and the scientific community to grapple with the threat of pollution. When risk reports turn out to be overblownâ€"or when risks are overlookedâ€"public skepticism abounds. This comprehensive and readable book explores how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can improve its risk assessment practices, with a focus on implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. With a wealth of detailed information, pertinent examples, and revealing analysis, the volume explores the "default option" and other basic concepts. It offers two views of EPA operations: The first examines how EPA currently assesses exposure to hazardous air pollutants, evaluates the toxicity of a substance, and characterizes the risk to the public. The second, more holistic, view explores how EPA can improve in several critical areas of risk assessment by focusing on cross-cutting themes and incorporating more scientific judgment. This comprehensive volume will be important to the EPA and other agencies, risk managers, environmental advocates, scientists, faculty, students, and concerned individuals.

Download or read book Principles for Modelling Dose response for the Risk Assessment of Chemicals written by World Health Organization and published by World Health Organization. This book was released on 2009 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published under the joint sponsorship of the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Labour Organisation and the World Health Organization, and produced within the framework of the Inter-Organization Programme for the Sound Management of Chemicals."

Download or read book Dose Response Analysis for Risk Assessment written by Yoon and published by . This book was released on with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment written by Charles N. Haas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-06-09 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the latest QMRA methodologies to determine infection risk cause by either accidental microbial infections or deliberate infections caused by terrorism • Reviews the latest methodologies to quantify at every step of the microbial exposure pathways, from the first release of a pathogen to the actual human infection • Provides techniques on how to gather information, on how each microorganism moves through the environment, how to determine their survival rates on various media, and how people are exposed to the microorganism • Explains how QMRA can be used as a tool to measure the impact of interventions and identify the best policies and practices to protect public health and safety • Includes new information on genetic methods • Techniques use to develop risk models for drinking water, groundwater, recreational water, food and pathogens in the indoor environment

Download or read book Risk Assessment in the Federal Government written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1983-02-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The regulation of potentially hazardous substances has become a controversial issue. This volume evaluates past efforts to develop and use risk assessment guidelines, reviews the experience of regulatory agencies with different administrative arrangements for risk assessment, and evaluates various proposals to modify procedures. The book's conclusions and recommendations can be applied across the entire field of environmental health.

Download or read book Regulatory Toxicology written by Franz-Xaver Reichl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will be written by experts for professionals, scientists and all those involved in toxicological data generation and decision-making. It is the updated and expanded version of a monograph published in German in 2004. Chemical safety is regulated on various levels including production, storage, transport, handling, disposal or labelling. This book deals comprehensively with the safety-ensuring methods and concepts employed by regulatory agencies, industry and academics. Toxicologists use experimental and scientific approaches for data collection, e.g. about chemical hazards, physicochemical features or toxicokinetics. The respective experimental methods are described in the book. Toxicologists also deal with much insecurity in the exposure and effect scenarios during risk assessment. To overcome these, they have different extrapolation methods and estimation procedures at their disposal. The book describes these methods in an accessible manner. Differing concepts from one regulation area to another are also covered. Reasons and consequences become evident when reading the book. Altogether, the book Regulatory Toxicology will serve as an excellent reference.

Download or read book Issues in Risk Assessment written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1993-02-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scientific basis, inference assumptions, regulatory uses, and research needs in risk assessment are considered in this two-part volume. The first part, Use of Maximum Tolerated Dose in Animal Bioassays for Carcinogenicity, focuses on whether the maximum tolerated dose should continue to be used in carcinogenesis bioassays. The committee considers several options for modifying current bioassay procedures. The second part, Two-Stage Models of Carcinogenesis, stems from efforts to identify improved means of cancer risk assessment that have resulted in the development of a mathematical dose-response model based on a paradigm for the biologic phenomena thought to be associated with carcinogenesis.

Download or read book Dose Response Analysis Using R written by Christian Ritz and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowadays the term dose-response is used in many different contexts and many different scientific disciplines including agriculture, biochemistry, chemistry, environmental sciences, genetics, pharmacology, plant sciences, toxicology, and zoology. In the 1940 and 1950s, dose-response analysis was intimately linked to evaluation of toxicity in terms of binary responses, such as immobility and mortality, with a limited number of doses of a toxic compound being compared to a control group (dose 0). Later, dose-response analysis has been extended to other types of data and to more complex experimental designs. Moreover, estimation of model parameters has undergone a dramatic change, from struggling with cumbersome manual operations and transformations with pen and paper to rapid calculations on any laptop. Advances in statistical software have fueled this development. Key Features: Provides a practical and comprehensive overview of dose-response analysis. Includes numerous real data examples to illustrate the methodology. R code is integrated into the text to give guidance on applying the methods. Written with minimal mathematics to be suitable for practitioners. Includes code and datasets on the book’s GitHub: https://github.com/DoseResponse. This book focuses on estimation and interpretation of entirely parametric nonlinear dose-response models using the powerful statistical environment R. Specifically, this book introduces dose-response analysis of continuous, binomial, count, multinomial, and event-time dose-response data. The statistical models used are partly special cases, partly extensions of nonlinear regression models, generalized linear and nonlinear regression models, and nonlinear mixed-effects models (for hierarchical dose-response data). Both simple and complex dose-response experiments will be analyzed.

Download or read book Toxicological Risk Assessment for Beginners written by José A. Torres and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book serves as a comprehensive introductory guide to the practical aspects of risk assessment. Chapters include clearly defined objectives and summaries. The book includes: hazard identification, dose-response, exposure assessment, risk characterization, chemical mixtures, epidemiology, emerging issues and global perspectives with accessible language. The book concludes with a set of hypothetical case studies. Toxicological Risk Assessment for Beginners aims not to create an expert, but rather to provide readers with their first understanding of the risk assessment topic. This book was designed with the student in mind. We simplify a complex process for beginners and balance theory with practical aspects, but remain fluid enough to increase difficulty with case studies. By incorporating an action based, step by step approach to learning the risk assessment process, this book provides its readers with an elementary understanding of how the risk assessment process is initiated, developed and finished, making it a valuable guide for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and early career scientists in industry.

Download or read book Evaluation of Guidelines for Exposures to Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1999-02-25 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naturally occurring radionuclides are found throughout the earth's crust, and they form part of the natural background of radiation to which all humans are exposed. Many human activities-such as mining and milling of ores, extraction of petroleum products, use of groundwater for domestic purposes, and living in houses-alter the natural background of radiation either by moving naturally occurring radionuclides from inaccessible locations to locations where humans are present or by concentrating the radionuclides in the exposure environment. Such alterations of the natural environment can increase, sometimes substantially, radiation exposures of the public. Exposures of the public to naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) that result from human activities that alter the natural environment can be subjected to regulatory control, at least to some degree. The regulation of public exposures to such technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive materials (TENORM) by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulatory and advisory organizations is the subject of this study by the National Research Council's Committee on the Evaluation of EPA Guidelines for Exposures to Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials.

Download or read book Drinking Water and Health Volume 8 written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1987-02-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharmacokinetics, the study of the movement of chemicals within the body, is a vital tool in assessing the risk of exposure to environmental chemicals. This bookâ€"a collection of papers authored by experts in academia, industry, and governmentâ€"reviews the progress of the risk-assessment process and discusses the role of pharmacokinetic principles in evaluating risk. In addition, the authors discuss software packages used to analyze data and to build models simulating biological phenomena. A summary chapter provides a view of trends in pharmacokinetic modeling and notes some prospective fields of study.

Download or read book Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation written by Committee to Assess Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the seventh in a series of titles from the National Research Council that addresses the effects of exposure to low dose LET (Linear Energy Transfer) ionizing radiation and human health. Updating information previously presented in the 1990 publication, Health Effects of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR V, this book draws upon new data in both epidemiologic and experimental research. Ionizing radiation arises from both natural and man-made sources and at very high doses can produce damaging effects in human tissue that can be evident within days after exposure. However, it is the low-dose exposures that are the focus of this book. So-called “late” effects, such as cancer, are produced many years after the initial exposure. This book is among the first of its kind to include detailed risk estimates for cancer incidence in addition to cancer mortality. BEIR VII offers a full review of the available biological, biophysical, and epidemiological literature since the last BEIR report on the subject and develops the most up-to-date and comprehensive risk estimates for cancer and other health effects from exposure to low-level ionizing radiation.

Download or read book EPA 630 R written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cancer Risk Assessment written by Peter G. Shields and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2005-05-24 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The assessment of cancer risk is a complex process that requires the examination of etiological agents, real-world environments, and individual rates of exposure. This reference offers practical approaches to determine cancer risk in individuals, groups of exposed persons, and the general public in relation to individual genetic and acquired suscep