[Health risk assessment of endocrine disrupting chemicals]

To assess possible health effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals(EDCs), standardized procedures for the health risk assessment of various chemicals could be employed. The procedures are comprised from 4 components: risk identification, exposure assessment, dose-response relationship and risk characterization. However, it should be born in mind that exposure assessment is particularly important to select candidate chemicals from 67 chemicals that were enlisted as suspected EDCs in the report "SPEED'98" of Environment Agency, Japan. At the same time, one should investigate low-dose effects, non-threshold mechanism and combined exposure to various EDCs since the issue of EDCs brings up a new paradigm in the filed of toxicology.