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- Dulio, Valeria, et al.
(författare)
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The NORMAN Association and the European Partnership for Chemicals Risk Assessment (PARC) : let’s cooperate!
- 2020
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Ingår i: Environmental Sciences Europe. - : Springer. - 2190-4707 .- 2190-4715. ; 32:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Partnership for Chemicals Risk Assessment (PARC) is currently under development as a joint research and innovation programme to strengthen the scientific basis for chemical risk assessment in the EU. The plan is to bring chemical risk assessors and managers together with scientists to accelerate method development and the production of necessary data and knowledge, and to facilitate the transition to next-generation evidence-based risk assessment, a non-toxic environment and the European Green Deal. The NORMAN Network is an independent, well-established and competent network of more than 80 organisations in the field of emerging substances and has enormous potential to contribute to the implementation of the PARC partnership. NORMAN stands ready to provide expert advice to PARC, drawing on its long experience in the development, harmonisation and testing of advanced tools in relation to chemicals of emerging concern and in support of a European Early Warning System to unravel the risks of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and close the gap between research and innovation and regulatory processes. In this commentary we highlight the tools developed by NORMAN that we consider most relevant to supporting the PARC initiative: (i) joint data space and cutting-edge research tools for risk assessment of contaminants of emerging concern; (ii) collaborative European framework to improve data quality and comparability; (iii) advanced data analysis tools for a European early warning system and (iv) support to national and European chemical risk assessment thanks to harnessing, combining and sharing evidence and expertise on CECs. By combining the extensive knowledge and experience of the NORMAN network with the financial and policy-related strengths of the PARC initiative, a large step towards the goal of a non-toxic environment can be taken.
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| 3. |
- Junghans, Marion, et al.
(författare)
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Application and validation of approaches for the predictive hazard assessment of realistic pesticide mixtures.
- 2006
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Ingår i: Aquatic toxicology (Amsterdam, Netherlands). - : Elsevier BV. - 0166-445X. ; 76:2, s. 93-110
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In freshwater systems located in agricultural areas, organisms are exposed to a multitude of toxicologically and structurally different pesticides. For regulatory purposes it is of major importance whether the combined hazard of these substances can be predictively assessed from the single substance toxicity. For artificially designed multi-component mixtures, it has been shown that the mixture toxicity can be predicted by concentration addition (CA) in case of similarly acting substances and by independent action (IA), if mixtures are composed of dissimilarly acting substances. This study aimed to analyse whether these concepts may also be used to predictively assess the toxicity of environmentally realistic mixtures. For this purpose a mixture of 25 pesticides, which reflects a realistic exposure scenario in field run-off water, was studied for its effects on the reproduction of the freshwater alga Scenedesmus vacuolatus. The toxicity of the tested mixtures showed a good predictability by CA. This is consistent with the finding that the toxicity was dominated by a group of similarly acting photosystem II inhibitors, although the mixture included substances with diverse and partly unknown mechanisms of action. IA slightly underestimated the actual mixture toxicity. However, the EC(50) values that can be derived from each prediction, according to CA respectively IA, only differed by a factor of 1.3. The finding of such a small difference is partly explainable by the fact that only few components dominate the mixture scenario in terms of so-called toxic units (TUs). This connection is established by developing an equation that allows to calculate the maximum possible ratio between corresponding predictions of effect concentrations by IA and CA for any given ratio of the TUs of mixture components, irrespective of their individual concentration-response functions and independent from their mechanisms of action. To evaluate whether small quantitative differences between EC(50) values predicted by CA and IA are an exception or rather the rule for agricultural exposure scenarios, this calculation was applied on an additional set of 18 pesticide exposure scenarios that were taken from the literature. For these scenarios, EC(50) values predicted by IA can never exceed those predicted by CA by more than a factor of 2.5. The findings of this study support the view that CA provides a precautious but not overprotective approach to the predictive hazard assessment of pesticide mixtures under realistic exposure scenarios, irrespective of the similarity or dissimilarity of their mechanisms of action.
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