Carcinogenicity evaluations and ongoing studies: the IARC databases.

Many thousands of chemicals are produced industrially and many more occur naturally. Information on the toxicology of these chemicals is often minimal or absent. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has published evaluations of the carcinogenic risk to humans of over 700 chemicals, groups of chemicals, and complex mixtures as a regular series of monographs. A database has been created containing summaries of all the relevant epidemiological, animal carcinogenicity, and other relevant biological data for each chemical or mixture evaluated. Additional databases have been created for ongoing epidemiological studies of cancer in humans and for long-term carcinogenicity studies in rodents, as well as a database containing information on genotoxic and related effects of chemicals. Some of these databases have been published in print form. IARC now plans to publish them electronically, together with other databases, in the form of a CDROM (compact disk, read-only memory). The objective will be to make the entire IARC database of cancer information as widely available as possible in an integrated format conducive to efficient and combined exploitation of all the component databases.