What is the difference between LD50s and toxicity values used in human health risk assessment?
The default toxicity values in RISC are from EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database (http://www.epa.gov/iris/index.html), which is the gold standard here in the US. There are detailed summaries in the IRIS database describing all of the animal studies used to extrapolate a human health toxicity value. There is also some information about the process in general in an “Introduction” section on the above web page. Having all EPA’s risk/toxicity assessments for each chemical available on the web is a fairly recent development (4-6 years ago?) so the German regulators may not be familiar with it yet. (That was just a “save face” comment.
