Integrated risk assessment and endocrine disrupters

The procedures currently employed for risk assessment are unlikely to be sustainable in the future for a variety of reasons. A number of actions are needed to remedy the situation and the most important of these actions are:. to improve access to existing data; to introduce a prioritisation system based on exposure assessment; to co-ordinate and harmonise approaches of different organisations involved in risk assessment. Integration of information and methodologies between human health risk assessment and ecological risk assessment (integrated risk assessment) is advocated in this paper as one of the most important steps towards a holistic and effective way of conducting a risk assessment. A framework is proposed for identification of agents for which an integrated risk assessment would be of particular value. Close collaboration across disciplines and across countries is necessary for the potential of integrated risk assessment to be realised in practice. The practicality of applying integrated risk assessment to endocrine disrupting agents is presently being investigated in an EU funded multi-laboratory collaborative study (CREDO). (C) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.