Approaches to Children’s Exposure Assessment: Case Study with Diethylhexylphthalate (DEHP)

Gary Ginsberg, Justine Ginsberg and Brenda Foos
Additional contact information
Gary Ginsberg: Partnership in Pediatric and Environment Health, Granby, CT 06026, USA
Justine Ginsberg: Partnership in Pediatric and Environment Health, Granby, CT 06026, USA
Brenda Foos: United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Children’s Health Protection, Washington, DC 20460, USA

IJERPH, 2016, vol. 13, issue 7, 1-21

Abstract: Children’s exposure assessment is a key input into epidemiology studies, risk assessment and source apportionment. The goals of this article are to describe a methodology for children’s exposure assessment that can be used for these purposes and to apply the methodology to source apportionment for the case study chemical, diethylhexylphthalate (DEHP). A key feature is the comparison of total (aggregate) exposure calculated via a pathways approach to that derived from a biomonitoring approach. The 4-step methodology and its results for DEHP are: (1) Prioritization of life stages and exposure pathways, with pregnancy, breast-fed infants, and toddlers the focus of the case study and pathways selected that are relevant to these groups; (2) Estimation of pathway-specific exposures by life stage wherein diet was found to be the largest contributor for pregnant women, breast milk and mouthing behavior for the nursing infant and diet, house dust, and mouthing for toddlers; (3) Comparison of aggregate exposure by pathways vs biomonitoring-based approaches wherein good concordance was found for toddlers and pregnant women providing confidence in the exposure assessment; (4) Source apportionment in which DEHP presence in foods, children’s products, consumer products and the built environment are discussed with respect to early life mouthing, house dust and dietary exposure. A potential fifth step of the method involves the calculation of exposure doses for risk assessment which is described but outside the scope for the current case study. In summary, the methodology has been used to synthesize the available information to identify key sources of early life exposure to DEHP.

Keywords: children; pregnancy; breast milk; house dust; contaminants; exposure assessment; plasticizer; phthalate; DEHP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/7/670/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/7/670/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:13:y:2016:i:7:p:670-:d:73239

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().