Adverse toxic perturbations introduced to the environment by mankind have raised fundamental questions about our understanding of environmental, geochemical, biological cycles, and fate of these toxic substances in multimedia environs. More and more, scientists are recognizing that environment must be considered as a whole, that scientific and regulatory approaches alike must take into account the complex interactions between multimedia and intermedia pathways including the health risks associated with these pathways. These observations have added impetus to the general quest among health scientists for understanding the interactions between these dynamic cycles and their end effect on human health within a risk based analysis framework.
Pollutants released to the environment are distributed among many environmental media such as air, water, soil, and vegetation, as a result of complex physical, chemical and biological processes. Thus, environmental pollution is a multimedia problem, and exposure assessment and the design of appropriate exposure evaluation methods require that we carefully consider the transport, fate, and accumulation of pollutants in the environment as a whole. Methods proposed to evaluate exposure characterization in this envirosphere must consider all pathways , and also the interactions between these pathways. This multimedia approach to exposure analysis is identified as Total Exposure Characterization (TEC) in the scientific literature. Most important aspect of these simulation tools, as they are perceived at this time, is that they are environmentally based. Most engineered solutions based on this concept commonly yield unfeasible and unattainable goals to solve problems related to environmental pollution and remediation.
The goal of the Cooperative Agreement is to redefine this process and introduce the terminology and simulation tools of Risk Based environmental analysis (Risk Based - Total Exposure Characterization (RB-TEC)). Although this concept is compartmentally available in the literature, it was not introduced to human exposure risk analysis in a comprehensive manner. Based on this concept, in this cooperative research program, human health risk analysis associated with environmental contamination will be incorporated into present day environmental simulation models. This approach will significantly change the manner environmental pollution is perceived until now and will provide a pathway for the attainment of more economically feasible solutions to address present and future environmental issues and their remediation.
The goal of the cooperative program is to address the basic principles of human exposure characterization based on the concept of RB-TEC. In this research program novel multimedia simulation (computational) tools will be developed which will aid successful, reliable, and expedient completion of health assessment studies. These computational tools will include Risk and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based analytical and numerical environmental simulation tools.