Acceptable Daily Intakes risk management

Interspecies and intraspecies UFs have been used in the development of safe or threshold exposure levels for chronic, noncancer toxicity by health organizations throughout the world. Examples include the acceptable daily intake (ADI) (Lu 1988 Truhaut 1991 Lu and Sielken 1991), the tolerable daily intake (TDI) or tolerable concentration (TC) (Meek et al. 1994 IPCS 1994), the minimal risk level (MRL) (Pohl and Abadin 1995), the reference dose (RfD) (Barnes and Dourson 1988 Dourson 1996), and the reference concentration (RfC) (EPA 1994 Jarabek et al. 1990). The importance of using distribution-based analyses to assess the degree of variability and uncertainty in risk assessments has been emphasized in recent trends in risk analysis. This will enable risk managers to make more informed decisions and... 

In this sense, safety factors, margin of safety, low dose extrapolations, etc. are not risk assessment tools, they are risk management tools. Thus while it has been noted in scientific experiments and observations that animal to animal variations are seldom greater than an order of magnitude and sensitivity from one species to another is usually within a factor of ten, the 1/100 safety factor for establishing acceptable daily intake (ADI) is not a risk assessment decision, it is a risk managerial decision with scientific input. 

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