Risk assessment experimentalists

There are a variety of "safety systems" available to systematically review projects to help identify hazards. However, most systems seem too laborious to be practical and/or not applicable at all for use by scientists engaged in bench research or scale-up work. This paper describes some risk assessment techniques and a mechanism for identifying hazards that are not burdensome and can readily be used by experimentalists. 

There is at least one major area of activity pertaining directly to the environment for which the reader will seek in vain. The complexity of environmental problems and the availability of personal computers have led to extensive studies on models of varying sophistication. A discussion and evaluation of these lie well beyond the competence of an old-fashioned experimentalist this gap is left for others to fill but attention is drawn to a review that covers recent developments in the application of models to the risk assessment of xenobiotics (Barnthouse 1992), a book (Mackay 1991) that is devoted to the problem of partition in terms of fugacity — a useful term taken over from classical thermodynamics — and a chapter in the book by Schwarzenbach et al. (1993). Some superficial comments are, however, presented in Section 3.5.5 in an attempt to provide an overview of the dissemination of xenobiotics in natural ecosystems. It should also be noted that pharmacokinetic models have a valuable place in assessing the dynamics of uptake and elimination of xenobiotics in biota, and a single example (Clark et al. 1987) is noted parenthetically in another context in Section 3.1.1. In similar vein, statistical procedures for assessing community effects are only superficially noted in Section 7.4. Examples of the application of cluster analysis to analyze bacterial populations of interest in the bioremediation of contaminated sites are given in Section 8.2.6.2. 

Another line of evidence involves the use of standardised experiments on animals [3]. If a chemical produces tumours in multiple tissues and/or multiple species after a relatively short time - of the order of 100 days - and the tumour leads to the death of the animals, then this chemical is considered a strong carcinogen [4,5]. Animal studies define precisely the route, frequency, duration and level of exposure. But how relevant are the test animals to humans This type of assessment is still very costly, time consuming, potentially hazardous to the experimentalists, and has also been criticised for sacrificing a large number of animals for results which are only indirectly related to risks for humans. 

Once material becomes a waste by a generator s decision or by regulatory definition, the first responsibility for its proper disposal rests with the laboratory worker. These experimentalists are in the best position to know the characteristics of the materials they have used or synthesized. It is their responsibility to evaluate the hazards and assess the risks associated with the waste and to choose an appropriate strategy to handle, minimize, or dispose of it. As discussed earlier in this volume (see Chapter 3, section 3.B), there are numerous sources of information available to the laboratory worker to guide in the decision making, including those required under various Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations. 

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