ABSTRACT
Health risk assessments provide an orderly, explicit, and consistent way to deal with scientific issues in evaluating whether a health hazard exists and what the magnitude of the hazard. Consequently, health risk assessment is defined as the process or procedure used to estimate the likelihood that humans or ecological systems will be adversely affected by a chemical or physical agent under a specific set of conditions. An expanded presentation on each of the four health risk assessment steps is provided below. An appropriate sampling program is critical in the conduct of a health risk assessment. This topic could arguably be part of the exposure assessment, but it has been placed within health problem identification because, if the degree of contamination is small, no further work may be necessary. A dose-response assessment should describe and justify the methods of extrapolation used to predict incidence, and it should characterize the statistical and biological uncertainties in these methods.
