Upcoming Workshops



           <<- Return to workshop home


                          BACKGROUND

          Exposure Science in the 21st Century

EPA's mission is to protect public health and ecosystems from environmental stressors. Effective environmental protection requires identifying risks associated with environmental stressors, prioritizing those risks, and designing and evaluating options for reducing the most important risks. Exposure science is important in all three activities.

Exposure is the contact of a stressor (biological, physical, or chemical agent) with a human or ecologic receptor for a specific duration. For exposure to occur, the stressor and the receptor must intersect in space and time, and exposure science characterizes and predicts that intersection. Exposure science also strives to characterize the stressor; its transportation and possible environmental transformation; the magnitude, frequency, and duration of exposure; the populations exposed and their characteristics; activities and behaviors that might affect exposure; the resulting dose; and the uncertainties associated with exposure predictions.

In this broad context, exposure science will have a crucial role in understanding and addressing the increasingly complex environmental health problems of the future. Understanding aggregate exposures and cumulative risks explicitly requires estimating simultaneous exposures and doses to multiple stressors from multiple routes and sources. Predictive exposure models will be needed to understand risks posed by emerging contaminants. Exposure models will need to be able to evaluate the impacts of multiple risk reduction options, which will allow identification of the most effective actions. Likewise, exposure metrics will provide the ability to determine whether our actions have made a difference.

Despite its great potential, exposure science is still evolving as a formal scientific discipline with a common set of principles, concepts, and vocabulary. This workshop will discuss the status of exposure science, identify future challenges, evaluate methods and technologies that might make exposure science more predictive, and consider theoretical frameworks or conceptual models from other fields that might inform exposure science. The integration of exposure science in other relevant fields, such as toxicology, public health, and risk assessment, will also be discussed.



Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology