Brazil was one of the first countries in Latin America to institutionalize a National Environmental Policy in 1981, including the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process of economic activities with anticipated impacts on the environment. Today, EIA practice in Brazil comes with a number of limitations: it is constrained by its environmental advocacy role; application is strongly oriented ...

Chemical mixtures and multiple routes of exposure are frequently difficult problems for exposure and risk assessors. Chemicals can interact synergistically or antagonistically at a variety of physiologic and biochemical loci within target cells. Many of these interactions can be accounted for with a thorough understanding of the pharmacokinetics of the compounds in the mixture. Many pharmacokin...

Background: The importance of assessing student learning outcomes has demanded attention from most everyone involved in the higher education enterprise, as accreditation and funding implications are often linked to the results. Faculty, however, are often critical of the assessment process because outcomes assessment is costly with regard to time, energy and other resources, and evidence of its...

The authors describe the development of the undergraduate medical curriculum at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, especially over the last 15 years, when they led the Curriculum Committee. They describe the principles that have guided the curriculum development process up to this day; how the competency outcomes were designed and evolved as well as the main influences on the process; how th...

T he management of surgical illness requires appropriate metabolic and physiologic adjustment to preserve tissue and organ function. A patient’s baseline nutritional status along with optimal nutritional support will provide the substrate to meet the increase in metabolic demand. Adequate response to metabolic demands allows the host to limit catabolism, promote wound healing, and muster a defe...

The importance of reliable exposure assessment, as a key component of the overall risk assessment process, has been well described for some considerable time. Yet, despite this widely accepted tenet, many studies conclude significant adverse health effects, with associated public policy implications, in the absence of adequate or, in some cases, even rudimentary, exposure quantification. Moreov...

Risk assessment differs from other medical interventions in that the welfare of the patient is not the immediate object of the intervention. However, improving the risk assessment process may reduce the chance of risk assessment itself being unjust. We explore the ethical arguments in relation to risk assessment as a medical intervention, drawing analogies, where applicable, with ethical argume...

We describe the formative assessment process, using an approach based on social learning theory, for the development of a school-based obesity-prevention intervention into which cultural perspectives are integrated. The feasibility phase of the Pathways study was conducted in multiple settings in 6 American Indian nations. The Pathways formative assessment collected both qualitative and quantit...

As the preceding chapter suggests, vocational educators are likely to find more than one assessment strategy that will serve their purpose. Two important criteria for deciding which assessment to use in a particular situation are the quality of the information provided and the feasibility of the assessment process. This chapter describes these criteria and compares selectedand constructed-respo...