Toxicology and environmental risk analysis

Risk-based decision-making increasingly has global dimensions, extending from the international management of chemical risks to the sustainable development of our planet. Environmental risk analysis is firmly based on toxicological sciences with input from other public health disciplines. Increasing understanding of how the human genotype and phenotype affects absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of xenobiotics (compounds foreign to a living organism), is providing insight into answers to the oldest human question about disease: ‘Why me?’ The risk paradigm components of hazard assessment, dose–analysis, exposure assessment, risk characterization, risk management, and risk communication, and the toxicological concepts on which they are based, have proven durable in approaching increasingly complex environmental hazards. Newer approaches to managing risk, such as the precautionary principle, and newer challenges, such as nanotechnology and genetically modified organisms, necessitate further systematic thinking on how best to protect human health and the environment.