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From the aforesaid basic definition and brief description of epidemiology and of toxicology, it is convincing that some epidemiologists and toxicologists do share some of their professional interests and activities with one another, especially in the area of health risk assessment or of regulating public health. An academic discipline such as toxicologic epidemiology thus should have hybridized from their mutual involvement in these areas. In fact, some epidemiologists are seen to be doing the work available in the toxicology profession, and vice versa.
In reality, the hybridization into such a sub-discipline is far from completion. There are reasons for this incompletion. One reason is that epidemiology faculties and their work still are very much statistically, medically, clinically, or otherwise observation oriented. Toxicology faculties and their work, on the other hand, are more laboratory and experimentation oriented. A third reason is that the conception and the movement of health risk assessment are still in their infancy, even in industrial countries. As a matter of fact, toxicology was not well recognized or accepted as an academic discipline until perhaps after the mid 1980s, the time when public health as well as epidemiology began to flourish to a popular subject in graduate schools of public health in the United States.
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