Inhalation Toxicology: Awareness, Identifiability, Statistical Perspectives and Risk Assessment

Review, discussion, and summary: toxicology.

The research presented in the toxicology session of the Symposium on the Health Effects of Acid Aerosols significantly advances our understanding of the health effects of acid aerosols and clearly illustrates the importance of animal inhalation toxicology to risk assessment. The description of the effects of acid on airway mucus buffering capacity and viscosity helps explain some of the mechani...

Dosimetry of particles in laboratory animals and humans in relationship to issues surrounding lung overload and human health risk assessment: a critical review.

Overview of inhalation toxicology.

The development of inhalation toxicology as a distinct discipline can be traced back well over one hundred years. The technology has advanced in terms of materials and designs used to construct inhalation chambers and the equipment used to generate controlled test atmospheres of a wide variety of gases, vapors, dusts, and droplets. Consideration of metered dose inhalers, a relatively recent con...

Pharmacokinetics and expert systems as aids for risk assessment in reproductive toxicology.

A minimal approach to risk assessment in reproductive toxicology involves four components: hazard identification, hazard characterization, exposure characterization, and risk characterization. In practice, risk assessment in reproductive toxicology has been reduced to arbitrary safety factors or mathematical models of the dose-response relationship. These approaches obscure biological differenc...

OSHA's approach to risk assessment for setting a revised occupational exposure standard for 1,3-butadiene.

In its 1980 benzene decision [Industrial Union Department, ALF-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, 448 U.S. 607 (1980)], the Supreme Court ruled that "before he can promulgate any permanent health or safety standard, the Secretary [of Labor] is required to make a threshold finding that a place of employment is unsafe--in the sense that significant risks are present and can be lessened by a cha...