[Animals as sentinels of environmental pollution]

Under appropriate conditions, the use of domestic and wild animals can help to reveal the presence of unknown chemical contaminants in the environment before they cause harm to humans or help identify the amount of exposure to known chemical contaminants. This paper examines how animals could contribute to improve knowledge of environmental health issues. The value of using animals to identify and monitor a wide variety of environmental hazard to human health and ecosystems is discussed. Some epidemiological and experimental approaches to use animals as environmental sentinels to detect hazards before they would be discovered with more traditional methods, human epidemiological studies or laboratory-animal experiments are described. The gaps in existing data that need to be addressed if animal sentinel data are to be used in human risk assessment are considered.