Safe Drinking Water Committee – författare

The National Research Council closes the landmark series Drinking Water and Health with Volume 9, published in two parts:

Part I: DNA Adducts provides an overview of DNA adducts and their effects on human health, explores the techniques currently in use for detecting them, offers an outlook on future toxicity testing, and lists specific recommendations for action.

Part II: Mixtures explores the issues surrounding multiple-chemical exposure from drinking water and reviews options for grouping compounds so their toxicity in mixtures can be reliably assessed. The book describes alternative approaches and considers the option of developing a modified "hazard index" for chemical compounds.

The most recent volume in the Drinking Water and Health series contains the results of a two-part study on the toxicity of drinking water contaminants. The first part examines current practices in risk assessment, identifies new noncancerous toxic responses to chemicals found in drinking water, and discusses the use of pharmacokinetic data to estimate the delivered dose and response. The second part of the book provides risk assessments for 14 specific compounds, 9 presented here for the first time.

Chlorination in various forms has been the predominant method of drinking water disinfection in the United States for more than 70 years. The seventh volume of the Drinking Water and Health series addresses current methods of drinking water disinfection and compares standard chlorination techniques with alternative methods. Currently used techniques are discussed in terms of their chemical activity, and their efficacy against waterborne pathogens, including bacteria, cysts, and viruses, is compared.

Charts, tables, graphs, and case studies are used to analyze the effectiveness of chlorination, chloramination, and ozonation as disinfectant processes and to compare these methods for their production of toxic by-products. Epidemiological case studies on the toxicological effects of chemical by-products in drinking water are also presented.

Pharmacokinetics, the study of the movement of chemicals within the body, is a vital tool in assessing the risk of exposure to environmental chemicals. This book—a collection of papers authored by experts in academia, industry, and government—reviews the progress of the risk-assessment process and discusses the role of pharmacokinetic principles in evaluating risk. In addition, the authors discuss software packages used to analyze data and to build models simulating biological phenomena. A summary chapter provides a view of trends in pharmacokinetic modeling and notes some prospective fields of study.