How Accurate and Reliable Are Exposure Models?

In this issue of the Annals of Work Exposures and Health, several authors report on the validation of exposure assessment models. Since the introduction of the European regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH; European Parliament, 2006), various risk/exposure assessment tools have been developed and are currently widely used for chemical safety assessments. Between the start of the REACH Registration period in 2008 and September 2014, around 40000 substance dossiers had been submitted to ECHA. As noted by George Box in 1987 'essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful' (Box et al., 1987), and more recently it has been stated that models cannot and should not replace the collection of good quality exposure measurements (Kromhout, 2016). Nevertheless, the European occupational hygiene community will not be able to collect a sufficient number of exposure measurements to obtain exposure estimates for all relevant existing and new exposure scenarios. The risk assessments under REACH hence follow a tiered approach in which the first tier should provide a conservative (i.e. protective) system that can discriminate between substances in scenarios of some concern and those which are considered safe, and higher tier models should provide a higher degree of accuracy, even if at a cost of less conservative results.

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