Towards Comprehensive Health Risk Assessments of Chemicals for Occupational and Environmental Health

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd) License. ©2017 National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health Exposure to chemicals in the workplace or in the environment has led to devastating health problems. Some cases involve exposure to chemicals at unsafe concentrations or at high doses; others involve life-long exposure to low levels of chemicals that are contaminated in food, water, or air. The historical evidence indicates societies often placed profits and prosperity before health and environmental concerns. However, these incidents have also led to a gradual understanding of the associated human and environmental costs and generated common interest in protecting human health and preserving the environment. Various international organizations, national authorities, and non-governmental bodies have made significant efforts to assess the potential health risks posed by chemicals and to safeguard individuals from hazards both in the workplace and in the general environment. In particular, chemicals occurring in commercial products or in the environment are generally subject to risk assessments. This article seeks to describe some typical characteristics of workplace and environmental chemical risk assessments to identify potential problems and to envisage an integrated risk assessment paradigm. A vast store of information on various chemicals, including data on characteristics, behavior when released into the environment, and toxicity in humans and laboratory animals, has been accumulated to date and is available as common scientific assets for risk assessments. Data-driven standards and guidelines derived from risk assessments are widely used as safeguards to protect people in the workplace and for public health. Health risk assessments seek to estimate risks posed by exposure to a particular agent for a given target organism, system, or population or subpopulation, including identification of attendant uncertainties, based on the inherent characteristics of the agent and the characteristics of specific target systems. As is well established, the risk assessment process begins with the formulation of the problem or issue and includes four additional steps: 1) hazard identification; 2) hazard characterization; 3) exposure assessment; and Editorial