Workshop: Advancing Quantitative Analysis in Human Health Assessments through Probabilistic Methods

Monday, October 7-8, 2024 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC and online

Slides from the workshop are available below.

Agenda (final draft, updated October 1)

The EPA Office of Research and Development, in conjunction with NICEATM, convened a workshop to facilitate discussion of probabilistic methods in human health risk assessment. This workshop provided examples of application of probabilistic methods in chemical risk assessments, highlighted ongoing research, and discussed the needs and challenges for the regular use of these methods.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently recommended consideration of how and when traditional deterministic approaches for human health risk assessment (i.e., toxicity value point estimates) can be transitioned towards probabilistic methods for deriving risk-specific doses. This workshop highlighted past examples where probabilistic methods were implemented to derive chemical-specific toxicity values, provided insight into the current state of the research surrounding probabilistic methods in chemical risk assessments, and discussed the future directions for implementing these probabilistic methods in human health assessments.

Broken into four subtopics, the agenda featured sessions on:

• Probabilistic exposure
• Toxicokinetics
• Benchmark dose modeling
• Toxicity value determination

Throughout these sessions interdisciplinary panels comprising subject matter experts from government, industry, academia, and NGOs conducted panel discussions to evaluate the proposed methods and provide suggestions for how the transition might be implemented. Workshop participants gained a greater understanding of probabilistic methods within the context of human health assessments and  guided discussion for how these methods may ultimately be implemented.