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The last 9
lectures together provide an overview of the linkages among public health, health risk
assessment (RA), toxicology, and epidemiology, with the first 4 being more philosophical
and the last 3 relatively more quantitative in nature. The 2 lectures presented in-between
(Lectures 5 and 6) utilized 6 actual epidemics cases to provide a historical perspective
of toxicologic epidemiology, which is defined in this series as the study of the frequency
and distribution of adverse human health effects caused or modified by toxic agents or
harmful materials. The real intent of this series of lectures is, nonetheless, not an
attempt to offer a historical perspective of toxicologic epidemiology, but rather a sense
of where, what, and how this infant is growing into. This will be the focus of discussion
in the next and final lecture of this series. Also to be discussed in Lecture 10 are some
of the career opportunities for those health scientists wishing to work in this
discipline, or for those already in some subareas of this discipline.
RA is both a public health discipline and a quantitative process. As the latter, it
includes human exposure assessment (HEA), toxicity assessment (TA), and health risk
characterization. To a great extent, the future direction of the research into RA, and
hence into toxicologic epidemiology as well, is guided or governed by the issues centering
around the many uncertainties inherent in HEA and TA, some of which were just discussed
here in the present lecture.
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