Analysis of the registry of toxic effects of chemical substances (RTECS) files and conversion of the data in these files for input to the environmental chemicals data and information network (ECDIN).

A data bank for environmental chemicals, ECDIN, is being developed at the Joint Research Centre of the European Communities in cooperation with universities and research institutes in the nine member states as a part of the Environmental Research Programme of the EC. During the pilot phase of the project, data from the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances have been incorporated into the data bank. Conversions of the data into ECDIN input format was necessary before inclusion of the toxicity data in ECDIN, and the computer programs used for this format conversion have produced various statistics for the contents of the RTECS files. Analyses of the data in three editions of RTECS are presented.