ABSTRACT
For registration of newly developed chemicals and the reevaluation of existing
marketed chemicals, competent authorities need reliable information such as the
amount of the chemical used, the various work-related situations in which the
chemical will be used, whether the chemical will be used indoors or outdoors, in
open or closed situations, and in what way and to what extent workers/consumers
may be exposed to the chemicals during their daily practice. With sufficient and
reliable data to hand, the registrant and/or the competent authority may predict
the occupational risk and the risk for consumers more precisely. However, there
are more then 30,000 chemicals on the market. This large number makes it almost
impossible to collect these important data for all the substances with respect to
the various scenarios whereby these chemicals are being used. The need for a
sophisticated method to predict the risks for human in a rather straightforward and
easy but sometimes conservative way was the basis for a large project funded by
the European Commission (DG Research) in which scientists from 15 institutes
of 10 European countries participated to overcome large parts of this problem.
The overall outcome and the various items developed within this project, named
RISKOFDERM, are outlined in the first part of this chapter. However, a particular
substance or a work-related situation may require additional data to predict the
risk not only of external exposure but also on the internal exposure combined
with the external exposure data. Therefore, knowledge of the various aspects of
the dermal absorption process and the kinetics and the influence of various
work-related factors on this process is needed. The last part of this chapter gives
an overview of such important parameters.
