Practitioner Insights: Bringing New Methods for Chemical Safety into the Regulatory Toolbox; It is Time to Get Serious

Disease prevention is the goal of chemical risk assessments, and done efficiently and properly they minimize the societal cost of environmentally-induced diseases. Indeed, risk assessments are essential for the protection of human health and the environment from the exposures to hazardous chemicals in the industrial world. For the past several decades, toxicology has followed a well-trod path of studying the effects of individual chemicals using high dose exposures in laboratory animals, and employing various adjustment factors to predict safe levels of human exposure for use in risk assessments.

This strategy appears to have prevented overt impacts of chemicals on humans ...