Dermal Exposure Assessment: A Summary of EPA Approaches

This report was produced as a result of an internal dialogue among a group of exposure assessors from different Agency programs. When the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT) began an update of its Chemical Screening Tool for Exposures and Environmental Releases and Consumer Exposure Models in 2003, the staff convened meetings with various experts on dermal exposure assessment from around the Agency to discuss recent advances and the current state of dermal exposure assessment practice. These experts recognized there would be a benefit to describe the different approaches used to conduct dermal exposure assessment in the Agency. The result would increase awareness and understanding of alternate approaches to estimate dermal penetration and identify areas where approaches might be harmonized to exchange information and to share methods and data to improve the transparency of dermal exposure assessments in the Agency. To achieve this, the Agency’s Risk Assessment Forum (RAF) commissioned a report in 2004 documenting and comparing the approaches, assumptions, and methods used across the Agency for dermal exposure assessment.

This report was then used as the basis for the dialogue at a RAF sponsored cross-Agency colloquium, the Colloquium on Dermal Exposure Methods Comparison in 2005, to identify common factors and differences of dermal exposure assessment methods, to identify opportunities for harmonization among different dermal exposure assessment methods, and to determine future research needs (U.S. EPA, 2005). Coincidentally, the RAF report and colloquium coincided with NCEA research efforts to evaluate methods to estimate permeability coefficients (Kp) and to assess the importance of dermal exposure to chemically contaminated water, soil, and sediment, leading to the development of this report.

This is the Final Report.