Human Health Risk Assessment - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 252

Epidemiologists prefer to use exposure situations already existing in society,
although the disadvantage of these 'studies' is that these exposure conditions are
not always favourable and often are even unknown.
5.6.6.2 Animals
The last few decades, there has been an intensive debate on the use of animals,
such as mice, rats and pigs, for experiments. It is often stated that animal testing is
cruel and leads to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of
animals worldwide. The majority of these experiments is performed for medical pur-
poses. But these types of experiments are also performed for environmental quality
assessment. Several organisations such as the European Centre for the Validation of
Alternative methods ( ECVAM ) in the European Union (ECVAM 2009 ), People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals ( PETA )intheUS(PETA 2009 ) and Animal Aid
in the UK (Animal Aid 2009 ) focus on the fate of experimental animals. Today, it is
widely recognized that animal experiments must be prevented as much as possible.
5.6.7 Relationship Scientist and Decision-Makers
It is often said that Risk Assessment is an objective process and that scientists must
operate independently of the interests of any stakeholder. To a certain extent this is
true; scientific independence is a key to an objective risk qualification. This indepen-
dent position, however, certainly does not justify a strict 'no communication policy'.
The independent status of scientists will not be affected by adaptation to specific
political boundary conditions, as long as it is made transparent what these bound-
ary conditions are. Human Health Risk assessors can do an excellent and objective
job when they, for example, commit themselves to the political boundary condition
that a Human Health Risk Assessment for an industrial site focuses on 'average
adult workers' and does not relate to children or other sensitive groups. Again, it is
important to identify these boundary conditions and, hence, make the validity range
of the conclusions from the Risk Assessment transparent. Therefore, this political
boundary condition must clearly be described in the Risk Assessment report. This
enables regulators to ensure the safety of these sensitive groups, for example, by
fencing off the site using some means of controlled access to protect children in the
case of the above-mentioned example.
5.6.8 Site-Specific Risk Assessment
The most elegant way of dealing with site-specific Human Health Risk Assessment
is by using a tiered approach , that is, a stepwise approach. In such an approach
several assessment steps (tiers) are described. In each higher tier, the assessment
is based on more site-specific elements, is less conservative, and, hence, is more