Risk assessment administration processes

US-EPA has formed the Risk Assessment Forum, a standing committee of senior US-EPA scientists, to promote US-EPA consensus on difficult and controversial risk assessment issues and to ensure that this consensus is incorporated into appropriate US-EPA risk assessment guidance. To fulhil this purpose, the Forum assembles US-EPA risk assessment experts in a formal process to study and report on issues from a US-EPA scientific perspective. Major Fomm guidance documents are developed in accordance with the US-EPA s regulatory and policy development process and become US-EPA pohcy upon approval by the Administrator or the Deputy Administrator. The Risk Assessment Forum products include risk assessment guidelines, technical panel reports on special risk assessment issues, and peer consultation and peer review workshops addressing controversial risk assessment topics. 

One of the main challenges for risk assessors and managers is to make people aware that our knowledge on chemicals is incomplete and uncertainty is inherent to the risk assessment process, especially if mixtures are involved. This is a difficult task since the notion of uncertainty is in conflict with the traditional image of the natural sciences as a provider of unambiguous answers. Not only the general public suffers from this view, but also administrators and policy makers, who often consider uncertainty a nuisance in their search for clear answers and effective policy actions. Here lies an important task for risk assessors and communicators, that is, the development of adequate tools to identify, describe, quantify, and communicate... 

In line with its risk assessment approach to regulatory control, and to facilitate the administrative processing of applications, Medsafe categorises NMAs into three types, as follows ... 

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