Approaches for exposure characterization and data needs for hazardous waste site assessment

This article provides an understanding of the approaches for determining exposure and dose to populations in the vicinity of hazardous waste sites. A review of the federal legislation and jurisdiction for assessments is provided, and the approaches of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry are compared. These methods strive to aid in the evaluation of public health impacts of contaminants that were, are, or may be released to the community, and they are concerned with various aspects of the contaminant fate, human contact, and toxic response for chemicals of concern. Such approaches have been designed for generic contamination scenarios, but they aim to be applicable to a wide range of chemicals and sites in the real world. Along with any modeling framework for exposure and dose characterization, detailed information or real data are requisite for the completion of any site-specific assessment. What kinds of data are needed and where they may be found are also discussed. A comprehensive framework for exposure characterization, recently proposed by Georgopoulos and Lioy, is outlined. The framework is one employing the following elements: chemodynamic analyses of sources and receptors; characterization of the target population; toxicokinetic/toxicodynamic analyses; uncertainty/error analyses; and evaluation of the characterization performance.