Moving towards a preventive approach

Toxicology and ecotoxicology are disciplines that have developed in response to a need for information about the possible damages that might result from chemical usage. During the seventies a shift occurred from a posteriori control of chemical impacts to the prevention of this type of damage. The change in emphasis occurred first in the scientific community and then in the administrative and political spheres. As a result, many important regulations were approved for application across Europe. The essence of these regulations was to require preliminary information on the toxicology and ecotoxicology of chemicals in order to make available data needed for a preventive risk assessment of the characteristics of the marketed chemicals.

In particular, the Toxic Substances Control Act (US EPA, 1978) in the USA and the Sixth Amendment to the Directive on Dangerous Substances (EEC Council Directive, 1979) in Europe require the development of a basic set of information before a new chemical substance may be marketed. The required data set dealt with several characteristics of the substance (chemical structure, use patterns, physico-chemical properties, analytical methods, etc.) and includes toxicological and ecotoxicological tests at different levels of complexity in relation to the amount of the substance produced and the results at the preliminary levels (see Table 1).

The challenge to the scientific community was therefore: to what extent can the impacts of the chemicals be predicted by reference to this relatively limited set of data?