Department of Health and Safety Convergence Science, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Korea.
Soonchunhyang University, Cheonan Hospital, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, Chungcheongnam-do 31151, Korea.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Mar 17;17(6):1970. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17061970.
Biocides are non-agricultural chemical agents for the prevention of unhygienic pests. The worldwide demand for biocidal products has been rapidly increasing. Meanwhile, biocides have been causing negative health effects for decades, resulting in public health scares. Therefore, governments around the world have tried to strictly control biocides, and it is necessary to prioritize the health risks of biocides for efficient management. Chemical ranking and scoring (CRS) methods have been developed for the effective management of chemicals. However, existing methods do not use suitable variables to evaluate biocides, thus possibly underestimating or overestimating the actual health risks. We developed a new CRS method that reflects the exposure and toxicity characteristics of biocides. Eleven indicators were chosen as appropriate for prioritizing biocides, and scoring based on the globally harmonized system of classification and labeling of chemicals (GHS) improved the efficiency of the method. Correlations between individual indicators in this study were low (-0.151-0.325), indicating that each indicator was independent and well-chosen for prioritizing biocides. The effect of each indicator on the total score showed that carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, and reproductive toxicity (CMR) chemicals ranked high with r = 0.558. This result demonstrated that the most dangerous toxicants should play a more decisive role in the top ranking than the others. We expect that our method can be efficiently used to screen regulated biocides by prioritizing their health hazards, thus leading to better policy decision making about biocide use.
杀生剂是用于预防不卫生害虫的非农业化学药剂。全球对杀生剂产品的需求一直在迅速增长。与此同时，杀生剂几十年来一直对健康造成负面影响，导致公共卫生恐慌。因此，世界各国政府都试图严格控制杀生剂，有必要优先考虑杀生剂的健康风险，以便进行有效的管理。化学物质风险排序和评分 (CRS) 方法已被开发用于有效管理化学品。然而，现有的方法没有使用合适的变量来评估杀生剂，因此可能会低估或高估实际的健康风险。我们开发了一种新的 CRS 方法，该方法反映了杀生剂的暴露和毒性特征。选择了十一个指标作为优先考虑杀生剂的适当指标，基于全球化学品统一分类和标签制度 (GHS) 的评分提高了该方法的效率。本研究中各个指标之间的相关性较低（-0.151-0.325），表明每个指标都是独立的，并且很好地选择了优先考虑杀生剂的指标。每个指标对总分的影响表明，致癌性、致突变性和生殖毒性 (CMR) 化学品的排名较高，r = 0.558。这一结果表明，最危险的有毒物质在排名中应比其他物质发挥更决定性的作用。我们期望我们的方法能够通过优先考虑其健康危害来有效地筛选受监管的杀生剂，从而为杀生剂的使用做出更好的政策决策。
