ABSTRACT
Risk assessment [URL Ref. No. 2351 is being seen by some policy makers and legislators as a magic bullet, the application of which will immediately clarify and rationalize environmental regulations (Eklund, 1996; Yosie, 1987; Maxwell et al., 1999a, 1999b; Hartly, 1999) [URL Ref. No. 21, 68-69]. As known, a number of inherent technical and scientific uncertainties CURL Ref. No. 2611 underlie any risk assessment, and they include the following (Haas, 1996):
What is the distribution of exposures and their duration? What is the intrinsic sensitivity among the populations exposed, and how does one translate animal effects data into estimates of consequence to humans-the mouse to man problem? How does one extrapolate from high-dose (required by limited resources for testing) to low-dose effects'? How does one quantify the uncertainties in derived quantities given the uncertainties in input quantities?
