Critical selection of toxicological data on chemicals. The example of the International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals data bank.

Although chemicals provide important benefits, they can also represent hazards to human health or the environment. However, due to number of chemicals involved, clearly no country can deal alone with the evaluation of existing scientific, technical and legal information on chemicals. This implies a need for countries to work together to assess the risk posed by chemicals and to share the results in a compatible and understandable way. In 1973 the governing council of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) decided to proceed with the creation of the International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals (IRPTC). The core activity of IRPTC is the collection of information on chemicals into a computerized data bank and the dissemination of these data in the form of chemical data profiles. The data profiles focus on selected chemicals with a potential to affect human health and the environment, excluding chemicals whose sole use is as a pharmaceutical or which are radioactive substances. The data collection and selection activities of IRPTC are driven by two key issues: data quality and data quantity. The objective of IRPTC in this respect is to provide decision-makers and other users with the most pertinent data available to substantiate their assessment of hazard. Providing reliable and detailed data in manageable amounts was the strategy chosen to achieve this objective.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)