Exposure Science in the 21st Century A Vision and a Strategy (2012) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 3-18
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From page 3... ...
The ability to detect chemical contaminants in drinking water at low but biologically relevant concentrations quickly can help to identify emerging health threats, and monitoring of harmful algal blooms and airborne pollen can help to identify health-relevant effects of a changing climate. With regard to policy and regulatory decisions, exposure information is critical in budget-constrained times for assessing the value of proposed public-health actions.
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Advancing and promoting exposure science will allow it to have a more effective role in toxicology, epidemiology, and risk assessment and to meet growing needs in environmental regulation, urban and ecosystem planning, and disaster management. The committee identified emerging needs for exposure information.
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and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) asked the National Research Council to develop a long-range vision and a strategy for implementing the vision over the next 20 years, including development of a unifying conceptual framework for the advancement of exposure science.2 In response to the request, the National Research Council convened the Committee on Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21st Century, which prepared this report.
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Numerous state-of-the-art methods and technologies measure exposures, from external concentrations to personal exposures to internal exposures. (Selected technologies considered in relation to the conceptual framework 3 Intensity is the preferred term because some stressors, such as temperature excesses, cannot be easily measured as concentrations.
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Improved information on physical activity and locations of humans and other species obtained with global positioning systems and related geolocation technologies is increasingly combined with cellulartelephone technologies. Biologic monitoring and sensing increasingly offer the potential to assess internal exposures.
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GIS allows storage and integration of data from different sources (for example, exposure information and health characteristics of populations) by geographic location.
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Biomonitoring for Assessing Internal Exposures With advances in genomic techniques and informatics, exposure science is moving from collection of external exposure information on a small number of stressors, locations, times, and individuals to a more systematic assemblage of internal exposures to multiple stressors in individuals in human populations and multiple species in our environment. The committee considered three broad topics in biomonitoring: measures of internal exposure, biosignatures of exposure, and measurement of biochemical modifiers of internal exposure.
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4 models are expected to enable field measurements of chemical samples in blood, urine, or saliva from human and nonhuman populations and rapid interpretation of the concentrations in the samples. However, inferring the sources and routes of these internal exposures remains a research challenge.
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A number of informatics efforts are under way. For example, ExpoCast Database, developed as part of EPA's Expocast program to advance the characterization of exposure to address the new toxicity-testing paradigm, is designed to house measurements from human exposure studies and to support standardized reporting of observational exposure information.
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From page 12... ...
Adoption and validation of the eco-exposome concept should lead to the development of a universal exposure-tracking framework that allows the creation of an exposure narrative, the prediction of biologically relevant human and ecologic exposures, and the generation of improved exposure information for making informed decisions on human and ecosystem health protection. The vision is premised on the scientific developments of the last decade.
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From page 13... ...
Such an assessment may take various forms, including very narrowly focused studies, assessments that evaluate exposures to multiple stressors to facilitate cumulative risk assessment, or assessments that focus on vulnerable or susceptible populations. Engage stakeholders associated with the development, review, and use of exposure-science information, including regulatory and health agencies and groups that might be disproportionately affected by exposures -- that is, engage broader audiences in ways that contribute to problem formulation, monitoring and data collection, access to data, and development of decision-making tools.
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Providing effective responses to immediate or short-term public-health or ecologic risks requires research on observational methods, data management, and models: Short term Identify, improve, and test instruments that can provide real-time tracking of biologic, chemical, and physical stressors to monitor community and occupational exposures to multiple stressors during natural, accidental, or terrorist events or during combat and acts of war. Explore, evaluate, and promote the types of targeted population-based exposure studies that can provide information needed to infer the time course of internal and external exposures to high-priority chemicals.
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Long term Adapt hybrid designs for field studies to combine individual-level and group-level measurements for single and multiple routes of exposure to provide exposure data of greater resolution in space and time. Addressing demands for exposure information among communities, governments, and industries with research that is focused, solution-based, and responsive to a broad array of audiences: 7 Technologies used to identify and quantify all members of particular cellular constituents, for example, proteins (proteomics)
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, and the Food and Drug Administration -- that was established to leverage resources to advance the recommendations in the 2007 National Research Council report Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy serves as a relevant model. The present committee considers that the model used in establishing Tox21 could be extended to exposure science and lead to the creation of Exposure21.
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In light of that and the role that an understanding of environmental exposures can play in disease prevention, a rethinking of how NIH study sections are organized that incorporates a greater focus on exposure science would allow a core group of experts to foster the objectives of exposure-science research. In addition, an increase in collaborations between agencies should be explored; for example, collaborations between EPA, NIEHS, and NSF could support integrative research between ecosystem and human-health approaches in exposure science.
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Potential issues of privacy protection would need to be considered. CONCLUDING REMARKS Exposure information is crucial for predicting, preventing, and reducing human health and ecosystem risks.
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