Test Strategies to Assess Combined Actions and Interactions of Chemicals in Mixtures

3 TEST STRATEGIES TO ASSESS COMBINED ACTIONS AND INTERACTIONS OF CHEMICALS IN MIXTURES 

Ideally, all chemicals in a mixmre should be identified and the toxicity profile of each of the constiments as well as their potential combined actions and/or interactions should be determined over a wide range of exposure levels. For complex environmental mixmres, this approach is not realistic and therefore a number of approaches and test scenarios have been presented to obtain toxicological information on mixtures with a limited number of test groups (Cassee et al. 1998). 

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The main emphasis is paid to the identification of the basic principles for combined actions and interactions of chemicals (Section 10.2), and to the current knowledge on effects of exposures to mixtures of industrial chemicals, including pesticides and environmental contaminants. Test strategies to assess combined actions and interactions of chemicals in mixtures (Section 10.3) as well as toxicological test methods (Section 10.4) are addressed, approaches used in the assessment of chemical mixtures are presented (Section 10.5), and examples of experimental studies using simple, well-defined mixtures are given (Section 10.6). 

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