Exposure assessment

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Occupational hazards
Physical Chemical Biological Psychosocial
Hierarchy of hazard controls
Elimination Substitution Engineering controls Administrative controls Personal protective equipment
Occupational hygiene
Occupational exposure limit Exposure assessment Workplace exposure monitoring
Study
Occupational toxicology Occupational epidemiology Workplace health surveillance
See also
Aerosol NIOSH ratings Source control COVID-19 controls Fire fighter fatality investigation
v t e

Exposure assessment is a branch of environmental science, toxicology, epidemiology, environmental engineering, and occupational hygiene that focuses on the processes that take place at the interface between the environment containing the contaminant of interest and the organism being considered. These are the final steps in the path to release an environmental contaminant, through transport to its effect in a biological system. It tries to measure how much of a contaminant can be absorbed by an exposed target organism, in what form, at what rate and how much of the absorbed amount is actually available to produce a biological effect. Although the same general concepts apply to other organisms, the overwhelming majority of applications of exposure assessment are concerned with human health, making it an important tool in public health.^[1]

Risk is a function of exposure to an agent and the agent's inherent hazard.^[2] An environmental risk assessment consists of steps to identify and to characterize a hazard, to determine the dose-response relationship between an agent and an adverse outcome, to estimate potential exposures and, ultimately, to characterize the risk posed by an exposure to a biological, chemical or physical agent. Exposure assessments can be conducted for human populations at various scales, such as entire populations of a city or a sensitive subpopulation or community within the city. They may also be conducted for ecosystems or habitats within an ecosystem. They may even be conducted for nonliving, i.e., "abiotic", systems, such as exposure of structures and materials to an air pollutant. Exposure assessments are key tools for risk management, such as when a hazardous waste site is found to have contaminated a community's water supply. In this case, the data and information from the exposure assessment will be part of the calculations of the difference between present exposures to a contaminant and desired exposures during cleanup, e.g., zero exposure if an alternate source of clean water, e.g., bottled water, temporarily replaces the public water supply, and expected exposures when target pollutant concentrations will have been reached following the remediation of the waste site ^[3].