Safety/risk assessment of chemicals compared for different expert groups.

Two sets of 65 risk/safety assessments are compared. These assessments, mostly for pesticide chemicals, were developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at different times, often with different toxicity data, and with slightly different methods. Despite these differences, 38 sets of assessments give values that are within a 3-fold range of each other, 18 of these 38 are essentially identical (when rounded to one digit of precision), although not always for the same reasons. An additional 20 sets give values that lie within a 30-fold range; 6 sets lie within a 300-fold range; and the bromomethane ADI and RfD are 700-fold apart. In addition, on average the EPA values are lower than the WHO numbers. These comparisons are discussed in relationship to a developing world-wide consensus that the methods for evaluating the safety/risks from various chemicals should be more consistent and the resulting assessments should be more comparable. Moreover, we argue that an established assessment and associated information from one expert group should be routinely discussed in the ongoing evaluation of a chemical by another expert group. A procedure for effecting more consistency among such expert groups is proposed.