Risk assessment environmental science principles

US-EPA. 2004. An Examination of EPA Risk Assessment Principles and Practices. EPA/lOO/B-04/001 March 2004. Washington, DC Office of the Science Advisor. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http // www.epa.gov/osa/ratf.htm... 

USEPA (2001). General Principles for Petforming Aggregate Exposure and Risk Assessments, Report No. 6040, (November 21), United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Pesticide Programs and Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, Washington, DC, USA (website http //www.epa.gov/pesticides/oppfeadl/trac/science/). 

JECFA has been meeting since 1956, initially to evaluate the safety of food additives. Its mandate has been expanded to contaminants, natural toxins, and residues of veterinary drugs in food. The Committee has also developed principles for the safety assessment of chemicals in food that are consistent with the current thinking on risk assessment, and take account of recent developments in toxicology and other relevant sciences. These principles were originally published in 1987, as Environmental Health Criteria 70 Principles for the safety assessment of food additives and contaminants in food. 

Precaution and Environmental Science. When the precautionary principle is discussed in its relationship to science, it is often portrayed as an antiscience or a risk-management principle that is only used after undergoing conventional scientific processes. As discussed earlier, in practice the limitations of science to characterize complex risks show that precaution is not at odds (Kriebel et al., 2001). Further, precaution is not just about additional safety factors or changing risk assessment default assumptions. Research by U.S. EPA scientists has demonstrated that many of the EPA s Reference Doses - or conservative safe exposures - may correspond to risks of greater than 1 in 1000, meaning that safety factors alone may not protect health (Castorina and Woodruff, 2003). 

While risk assessment in the context of protecting public health has been performed for many years, it is the 1983 U.S. National Academy of Sciences Report (Committee on the Institutional Means for Assessment of Risks to Public Health Commission on Life Sciences National Research Council 1983) that has served as the tenet for practicing risk assessors (see Chapter 1). Risk assessment was defined as the characterization of the potential adverse health effects of human exposures to environmental hazards. The predictive aspect of risk assessment was set by the use of the word potential. A fundamental expectation of the risk assessment process was that it should attempt to accm-ately predict adverse effects before there is evidence of disease in the population. Thus, risk assessment goes beyond the mere description of epidemiological and clinical case-control studies. In that report, the committee defined logical components of a risk assessment which still serve as guiding principles today. They were and are (a) hazard assessment or the qualitative determination that a stressor poses a hazard as evidence by causal evidence of an ill effect,... 

Gupta, R. S. 2004. Introduction to Environmental Engineering and Science, 2nd ed. Rockville, MD ABS Consulting, Government Institute. An introduction to the fundamental principles common to most environmental problems is followed by major sections on water pollution, hazardous wastes and risk assessment, waste treatment, air pollution, global climate change, and hazardous substances. Includes problems to develop skills learned in the text. 

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