[Prioritization of semi-volatile organic pollutants for risk studies the case of organophosphorous flame retardants]
Hiérarchisation de contaminants anthropiques semi-volatils pour l’étude des risques. Le cas des retardateurs de flamme organophosphorés
Abstract
Choosing how to measure exposure assessment for studying health risks is a challenge in environmental health. Whether it assesses the contamination of media or the chemicals in biological matrices, the principal uncertainty is related to the choice of compounds to be studied. The objective of this work is to develop an approach for prioritizing semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC) to study these environmental health risks. The approach is applied to organophosphorous flame retardants (OPFRs), which have widely replaced brominated flame retardants, but for which sparse exposure and toxicity data are currently available. In view of this lack of data, the prioritization method is based on an approximation of human exposure, estimated by a score combining the exposure capacity, according to physicochemical properties (vapor pressure, octanol-water, and octanol-air partition coefficients, etc.), and the exposure prevalence, estimated by their European production or import tonnage. The method allowed us to prioritize almost all OPFRs (95/98) because it is based on widely available data. To avoid being limited to the best studied compounds, we did not take toxicity information into account, but it can be used in a second step to select other OPFRs with weaker exposure (at the end of the list). Moreover, this method is generalizable to other SVOC families. Copyright © 2019 John Libbey Eurotext
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