The discussion presented here thus far, including Part I and Part II of this lecture, suggests that the importance of and the effects on endocrine disruption from environmental pollutants revolve around three basic concepts or elements. These are the persistence, the toxicity, and the bioaccumulation of an environmental endocrine disruptor (EED).

From a risk assessment perspective, an EED’s potency and toxicity are far less critical by comparison, in that these properties are relatively highly chemical- and organ-specific. That is, they represent a much more static phenomenon. By static it means that these chemical and toxicological properties are intrinsic, definite, and permanent.

The effects of an EED’s persistence and bioaccumulation in the environment, on the other hand, are much more dynamic as they are changeable and, more importantly, attenuable. As alluded to in previous discussion, the same chemical (and hence with the same toxicity and potency) could easily be having a different level of persistence or bioaccumulation when it is transported to a different medium or environment.

That said, apparently one effective method of pubic health prevention or intervention is to divert the pollutant to an environmental medium in which its degradation half-life can be shortened substantially. If such a diversion is ineffective or infeasible, then the pollutant can be removed from the environment through proper clean-up or containment. Still another approach is through intervention of the anticipated chemical bioaccumulation by segregating the relevant predators at the higher trophic levels from preying on those down the food chain.