APPROACHES TO HUMAN RISK ASSESSMENT AND RISK MANAGEMENT FOR CLEANING PRODUCTS

Risk assessment and management procedures applicable to evaluating cle aning product safety are described. The four phases of the risk assess ment process described are hazard identification, dose-response assess ment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization. Risk management utilizes the results of a risk assessment to assist in the alleviation of risks. Determination of the potential toxicity of cleaning product s occurs during the hazard identification stage using data from tests on similar compounds or experiments run specifically for the material in question. If materials are predicted to elicit effects, a dose-resp onse assessment will identify the levels of exposure that will not ini tiate the effects. Exposure levels are calculated to determine the ant icipated human exposure. Human exposure and the dose-response assessme nts are integrated to characterize the health risks, if any, due to ex posure. Finally, any potential risks from the products will be mitigat ed so that the products can be safely used. Although this is a widely used process, risk assessment is as yet an inexact science, since it i s generally not possible to assign precise numerical values of increas ed probability of harm. To address this issue, risk assessors use stra tegies that tend, at each step of the process, to overestimate risk, d ue to compounding of conservative assumptions often used in risk asses sment. The degree to which the true risk is overestimated is unknown, and likely varies from ingredient to ingredient.