Considerations when Assessing Children's Exposure to Chemicals from Products
This document aims to enhance awareness for inclusion of children’s exposure in risk assessments when relevant and presents a children’s exposure decision tree that facilitates such decisions. The decision tree can be used to identify if a separate exposure assessment is needed with regard to children, and also aims to identify whether the exposure assessment conducted for adults already provides an acceptable level of safety of children. The focus of this document is on ‘industrial chemicals’, and targeted at ‘consumer products’. However, other types of products may also be covered, as such definitions can differ between countries. The key point of the document is to create awareness on child specific exposure. It is important to realise that legislations can also differ between countries, including existing requirements on whether to perform child-specific exposure and risk assessments. Exposure via food or the environment is regarded as background exposure in this document. The functionality of the decision tree is to raise awareness of children’s exposure to chemicals from products as well as to identify differences between adults’ and children’s exposure estimates illustrated by three case studies. The decision tree may be helpful in initiating the development of a guidance on how to perform a child-specific exposure assessment.
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