Most people spend most of their time indoors, and the poor quality of the indoor environment is a strong determinant of a variety of health problems. The principal way of preventing adverse health effects is to eliminate exposure to hazardous factors. But first, standardized methods of assessing exposure are necessary to assess the risk to health and to select optimal risk management actions. This book aims to facilitate the implementation of exposure assessment methods in public health practice.

Discusses pollution from tobacco smoke, radon and radon progeny, asbestos and other fibers, formaldehyde, indoor combustion, aeropathogens and allergens, consumer products, moisture, microwave radiation, ultraviolet radiation, odors, radioactivity, and dirt and discusses means of controlling or eliminating them.

"The combination of scientific and institutional integrity represented by this book is unusual. It should be a model for future endeavors to help quantify environmental risk as a basis for good decisionmaking." â€"William D. Ruckelshaus, from the foreword. This volume, prepared under the auspices of the Health Effects Institute, an independent research organization created and funded jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the automobile industry, brings together experts on atmospheric exposure and on the biological effects of toxic substances to examine what is knownâ€"and not knownâ€"about the human health risks of automotive emissions.

The objective of this manual is to provide guidance to risk assessors on the use of quantitative toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic data to address interspecies and interindividual differences in dose and concentration-response assessment. Section 1 focuses on the relevance of this guidance in the context of the broader risk assessment paradigm and other initiatives of the International Program on Chemical Safety (IPCS) project on the Harmonization of Approaches to the Assessment of Risk from Exposure to Chemicals. Technical background material is presented in section 2, followed by generic guidance for the development of chemical-specific adjustment factors in section 3 and accompanying summary figures. Illustrative case-studies are included in an Appendix, and a glossary of terms is also provided.--Publisher's description.