Children's Environmental Health Symposium 2014 - Impacts of Environmental Chemicals on Development

There is no cost to participate in the Symposium. Space is limited to 90 participants. Participation by Webcast is also available.

Please register here.

Webcast at – http://www.calepa.ca.gov/Broadcast/
Email your questions or comments to chs@oehha.ca.gov during the meeting. Question and answer periods are noted in the agenda. For technical issues during the meeting, please email help@oehha.ca.gov

You will be notified of your participation at the symposium or if you are placed on a waiting list should we reach capacity. If you request to join via webcast, we will send you a link to attend. Since space is limited, if you decide you cannot participate in person, please let us know by emailing collaboration@ucdavis.edu

Symposium 2014 Theme: Impacts of Environmental Chemicals on Development – Are complex interactions captured by traditional risk assessment practices?

The multi-disciplinary study of the effects of environmental stressors on infants and children is increasing our understanding of the complex relationships between exposure to environmental chemicals and effects on development, child and lifelong health. While typical animal toxicity studies can help define the toxicological characteristics of chemicals and provide information on which to base a regulatory risk assessment, they cannot tell us about impacts of other factors, including multiple chemical exposures and non-chemical stressors, on human response to environmental chemicals. Current human and animal research on response to chemicals, associations between environmental exposures and disease, and the literature on interactions between non-chemical stressors and toxicants paint a complex picture. Further, the push towards integrating information from in vitro assay systems, including the newer high throughput test systems results (e.g., Tox 21), computational toxicology, and read-across methods will be providing us with “non-traditional” toxicity data. How will we utilize these types of information in assessing hazards and risks from environmental chemical exposures?

Our current methods of risk assessment try to capture the complexity in general ways. For example, we use dose-response information for the most sensitive endpoint and most sensitive species, and uncertainty factors to account for interspecies extrapolation and inter-individual variability in response to a toxicant in the human population in non-cancer assessment. We weight carcinogen exposures that occur early in life when assessing cancer risk. Much uncertainty remains, and the newest scientific findings are forcing a re-thinking of risk assessment generally.

Continuing to educate ourselves is necessary to begin to address how we can more effectively conduct risk assessment. We are providing a forum in this symposium to hear some of the latest science regarding impacts of chemical exposures during development. This is a broad topic and thus we are focusing in three areas: 1) epigenetic changes from environmental exposures; 2) impacts of toxicants on the developing lung and brain; 3) new in vitro methods for assessing potential for developmental toxicity.

The goals of this symposium are to get regulatory scientists in California thinking about:

How to incorporate complex interactions into risk assessment, particularly for early life exposures;
How to incorporate information from new toxicity testing paradigms into risk assessments now; and
How to incorporate impacts of non-chemical stressors that increase vulnerability, and whether current methods of risk assessment adequately account for at least some of the vulnerabilities (e.g., use of weighting factors in cancer risk assessment, use of uncertainty factors).

Download the agenda and speaker biographies below.

Sponsors: California Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA). Children’s Environmental Health Program; UCSF Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit.