Environmental Risks

Takatorige, Toshio; Hirose, Yukio; Nagamatsu, Shingo

The magnitude of environmental risk from a chemical substance depends on the severity of health damage when exposed to the substance (e.g., exposure to benzene can cause leukemia in which case the worst scenario is death) and the amount of intake of the substance from the environment (e.g., the lifetime intake of benzene). In general, environmental risk evaluation proceeds in checking the hazards associated with the chemical substance, analyzing the relation of volume to reaction, measuring the amount of exposure, and assessing the risk, that is, first confirming the harm to health by the chemical substance and then evaluating how high the level of harm is to the health with the amount of intake, next the process of estimation to what level people take the substance from the environment, and last, judgment what level of health damages to expect at what level of exposure.