ABSTRACT
Given the intense political pressures on regulatory agencies to act quickly on public health issues and the limited resources available to them, it is not surprising that a generic, empirical and cookbook-like approach to the problem of human carcinogenic risk assessment has evolved and is now finding increasingly widespread use. With few exceptions, this approach treats all chemicals alike, irrespective of potentially significant differences in species susceptibility, target sites, tumour types, and, most importantly, mechanisms of action. It culminates with the estimation of a single quantity, termed the carcinogenic potency, from the database regarding a chemical’s toxicity. E. A. C. Crouch & R. Wilson have explored, in a strictly empirical fashion, the question of whether or not inter-species extrapolation of such cookbook-derived potency estimates is actually possible. They utilized selected tumour incidence data for both sexes of rats and mice as obtained in the series of 187 carcinogenesis bioassays conducted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the late-1970s.
