Risk assessment : a tool for the choice of toxicity reference value
Résumé
Toxicological Reference Value (TRV) are developed by international organisms (WHO, US EPA, ATSDR, OEHHA, RIVM, Health Canada, ANSES, EFSA, etc.) and used in order to quantify risk in safety risk assessments. These values are developed to protect human for acute (1-14 days), intermediate (several weeks) or chronic (all the life) exposure by both oral and inhalation routes. These values are elaborated for threshold effect or not depending on the mechanism of action of each substance. In its database 'chemicals portal', INERIS proposes tools for risk assessment corresponding to physico-chemical parameters, toxicological and ecotoxicological data for about 900 substances. Moreover, for the most usual environmental pollutants, summary of the key toxicological data and a choice of the most relevant TRV are established. Each TRV is analyzed for its quality taking into account the mechanism of action of the compound, the duration and the route of the exposure as previously described by Doornaert and Pichard (2006). If several values are availed the best one is preferred. If the quality is not judged sufficient the value is disallowed. But, in certain cases of effective risk, in order to protect populations these values have to be used by default. INERIS propose a set of choice of TRV for numerous usual environmental pollutants like organics (perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene, dichloroethylene, toluene, benzene, xylenes), or metals (cadmium, copper, cobalt). Actually the choice are performed for about forty substances. All results are publicly available on the database of INERIS 'chemicals portal' website: http://www.ineris.fr/substances/fr/.