Most of the developmental effects that populations experience are believed to be linked with their exposure scenario and/or their susceptibility to these exposures. In environmental public health, most studies have focused on exposures to environmental chemicals but certainly other environmental factors and susceptibility factors must be considered. Our laboratory assesses exposure to environme...

Reports of reproductive abnormalities in the American alligator from Lake Apopka, Florida, have been linked to a spill of DDT and other pesticides suspected of having hormonelike activity. To determine whether environmental chemicals had the potential to function as exogenous hormones in the American alligator, we examined the ability of chemicals to bind the estrogen receptor (aER) and progest...

This newsletter and additional information about the committee and its activities can be found at http://dels.nas.edu/emergingscience. The newsletter is prepared by National Research Council staff to keep you informed of activities of the Standing Committee on Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions. The views expressed in the newsletter are those of the meeting presenters and parti...

Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five i...

Endocrine disrupting activities in industrial chemicals have been a serious problem, because they are distributed broadly, they are active at very low concentrations, and some of them are difficult to detoxify. Moreover, only a small number of active chemicals are known, while most chemicals have not been examined yet. To reduce the number of examinations required for unknown chemicals, some co...

Robust statistical methods are important to the evaluation of toxicological interactions (i.e., departures from additivity) among chemicals in a mixture. However, different concepts of joint toxic action as applied to the statistical analysis of chemical mixture toxicology data or as used in environmental risk assessment often appear to conflict with one another. A unifying approach for applica...

Tissue cultures offer potential advantages for assaying the toxicity of chemicals and for evaluating tissue susceptibility to toxic agents. Several properties of cultured cells hinder the immediate, widespread use of tissue cultures to assay toxicity routinely. These points are illustrated by briefly reviewing attempts to utilize different types of hepatic cultures to evaluate the actions of ca...

The presence of environmental chemicals in human breast milk is of general concern because of the potential health consequence of these chemicals to the breast-fed infant and the mother. In addition to the mother's exposure, several features determine the presence of environmental chemicals in breast milk and their ability to be determined analytically. These include maternal factors and proper...

BACKGROUND Continuous exposure to many chemicals, including through air, water, food, or other media and products results in health impacts which have been well assessed, however little is known about the total disease burden related to chemicals. This is important to know for overall policy actions and priorities. In this article the known burden related to selected chemicals or their mixtures...

There are various kinds of good laboratory practice (GLP) monitoring authorities (MAs) in the world. Some countries have only one MA, while others, including Japan, have more than one MA. In addition, each MA has its own relationship with regulatory authorities (RAs), receiving authorities (RcAs) and industry based on the internal regulatory systems. There are eight GLP MAs in Japan. This numbe...