The Continuing Education course titled "Human Health Risk Assessment: A Case Study Application of Principles" was an advanced course. It was designed to build on content previously presented at CE courses in 2013 ("Basic Principles of Human Risk Assessment") and 2014 ("Methodologies in Human Health Risk Assessment")—both of which are accessible through SOT CEd-Tox: CE Online. The course represented perspectives from industry, academia, and government (US and Canada). It was endorsed by the Risk Assessment and Regulatory and Safety Evaluation Specialty Sections.
The course was very well-attended. The unique thing about this course was that the speakers used a real-world example as a teaching tool. The talks were organized according to the Risk Assessment Paradigm: hazard characterization, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization.
Bette Meek provided a brief introduction and gave a good overview of the course objectives and what participants can expect from the course.
Zhongyu (June) Yan from Dow Agrosciences started the course with an overview of various approaches used for hazard characterization for evaluation of the strength and consistency of available hazard data, culminating in a weight of evidence synthesis of hazard information;
Jay Zhao from the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) discussed dose-response information including default (allometric scaling) and pharmacokinetic approaches, including a live benchmark dose application from completed assessments.
Robinan Gentry from Ramboll Environ presented information documenting actual exposure and data useful in determining a default measure of exposure.
Finally, John Lipscomb from the US EPA presented risk characterization and demonstrated the development of drinking water maximum contaminant levels, maximum contaminant level-goals, reference values, and cancer slope factors, as well as methods to estimate risk at a given contaminant level.
The course booklet had a worksheet on the risk assessment examples, which were completed during the course.
At the end of the course, attendees were provided a risk assessment problem and were asked to characterize the hazard, estimate exposures, develop measures of toxic potency, and develop risk values for a hypothetical environmental contaminant. The problem will be available on the Risk Assessment Specialty Section website. A number of questions were asked and resulted in a good discussion.
If you are interested in taking this course, shortly after the SOT Annual Meeting and ToxExpo, it will be available as part of CEd-Tox: CE Online.