Hazard Identification in Carcinogen Risk Analysis: An Integrative Approach. Part3. An Application of the Methodology: Formaldehyde in Air

摘要

The report applies and tests the methodology developed in an earlier report(Crawford-Brown and Brown, 1992) to formaldehyde as an example. The methodology requires the performance of a series of analytical tasks using the extensive literature on formaldehyde. The tasks are: (1) define a series of contexts, or sets of empirical test conditions, into which the available data are placed; (2) determine the quality of the data for each context (i.e., appropriate test system, adequacy of experimental conditions, strength of measured effect); (3) evaluate the degree to which the data in each context support statements (or claims) of carcinogenicity. This involves the ennumeration of type of evidence (e.g. direct observations, theory-based inferences, empirical correlations, existential insights), the degree to which that type of evidence is compelling and overall judgments of degree of support across all types of evidence; (4) examine the degree of support for background premises necessary for extrapolating results from one context to the context of interest (e.g. high dose rat to low dose human contexts); (5) using the results of previous tasks, extrapolate to the context of interest and form a composite judgment of carcinogenicity.