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Data Sources for Prioritizing Human Exposure to Chemicals
Citation:
Dionisio, K. Data Sources for Prioritizing Human Exposure to Chemicals. Open Tox USA Meeting, Baltimore, MD, February 10 - 12, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Humans may be exposed to thousands of chemicals through contact in the workplace, home, and via air, water, food, and soil. A major challenge is estimating chemical exposures, which requires understanding potential exposure pathways directly related to how chemicals are used. With ~80,000 chemicals currently registered under the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act and only a small subset having been well characterized, there is a need to develop methods to obtain high-throughput exposure estimates so that chemical hazard screening approaches and exposure estimates together can allow for the complete development of high-throughput risk models. While information on production volume of chemicals is currently available, a large, uniformly organized repository of information on how chemicals are used, product composition, and other properties (e.g. physicochemical form of the chemical within the product, or physical form of the product) currently does not exist. The Chemical/Products Categories Database (CPCat) is the result of a large-scale effort to catalog and consolidate relatively disparate data sources in order to make chemical use information publicly available, and in a form useful for high-throughput exposure modeling.
