Is Risk Assessment “Holistic”?
PPCPs are a very large and diverse suite of potential pollutants. They rival agrochemicals in their usage rates and diversity of chemical classes. A true, “holistic” risk assessment process must take into account all bioactive compounds to which an organism is exposed. Up to now, PPCPs comprise a major group that has been excluded from the risk assessment process. PPCPs have never been subject to any water monitoring program (whether domestic waste or drinking) in the U.S. While true, all-encompassing risk assessments can never be performed, attention to the continually developing picture of the exposure universe could bring us asymptotically closer. The Need to Reach Past Our Historic Focus on Conventional Pollutants: During the last three decades, the study of environmental chemical pollution has maintained a steady fixation on conventional “priority pollutants,” including those collectively referred to as “persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic” pollutants (PBTs) or as “persistent o
