Addressing Aggregate Exposures for Cumulative Health Risk Assessments. J. Butler, M. MacDonell, and Y. S. Chang, Argonne National Laboratory
Health risk assessments have commonly addressed exposures to single-chemical hazards in individual environmental media as discrete elements of a focused assessment. However, a more realistic assessment that provides the appropriate context for these focused results would consider exposures to multiple hazards in multiple media by multiple routes of exposure. Risk assessments are being conducted to support environmental management plans for federal cleanup sites in this country and for industrial areas in East Asia. Among the key issues for these assessments is how to evaluate and present information for exposures to multiple chemicals in air, water, and soil in ways that can focus subsequent management plans on the dominant hazards considering the most likely exposure routes. Approaches for addressing this issue include developing visual displays of contaminant data combined with toxicity-based benchmarks to define site-specific or area-specific hazard profiles that can be used to guide risk reduction measures.
Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, under contract W31-109-Eng-38.
Go to . . .
2000 SRA Annual Meeting Table of Contents
2000 SRA Annual Meeting Author Index
Main Abstracts Menu Page
RiskWorld Home Page