Exposure science and its places in environmental health sciences and risk assessment: why is its application still an ongoing struggle in 2014?

Building a European exposure science strategy

“…Various foundational National Research Council reports recognise exposure science as an essential and integral part of the risk management process [1][2][3]. Compared with toxicology, however, exposure science is still ill developed as an independent discipline [2,4]. Yet, it has become an indispensable element in various science and policy frameworks, from policy analysis to sustainability assessment [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], and has been proposed as an important component in chemical substitution [14,15].…”

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“…Neither side of the continuum directly addresses the fundamental issue of "whether and how a human being actually makes contact with releases into the environment or workplace" as Lioy (2014) states. This is addressed by exposure scientists and the results provide the bridge between these two areas of inquiry.…”

“…When properly implemented, exposure measurements and modelling can confirm that a health outcome hypothesis is valid and well-grounded. Through the examination of several scenarios, exposure assessment can predict and eventually prevent human health and ecosystem risks (Lioy, 2014). This is a discipline that has become substantially more complex over the last years due to the increasing demand for accurate human exposure in all fields related to public health (WHO, 2001).…”

“…Personal monitoring refers to recurring measurements and evaluation of an individual's exposure to pollutants, across the various microenvironments where time is spent. The development of personal monitoring devices for environmental pollutants measurement started in the late 1970s and continues today (Lioy, 2014). Innovations in sensors technology nowadays create possibilities to collect environmental and exposure-related data at unprecedented depth and breadth.…”