RESUMO
Health, safety, and emergency planning professionals have a responsibility to identify acute hazards associated with chemicals and to find a way to transmit that information to chemical users, emergency responders, and others. Various organizations such as the Department of Energy are considering acute health hazard ratings as triggers that would mandate various activities. A paradigm shift away from a "lists" based approach to determining whether a chemical is sufficiently hazardous to require further analysis for emergency planning purposes is under way. Various toxicological data sources and approaches in use to develop an acute health hazard rating are discussed. Methods of extrapolating data from published and unpublished supporting documentation to develop an acute health hazard rating in the absence of toxicological data by animal species, chemical structure similarities, MSDS estimated values, and data mining are discussed. The process described analyzes applicable data and allows the analyst to determine reasonable health hazard rating numbers for chemicals without published hazard ratings and for mixtures of chemicals. The level and amount of resources available will determine which methods will be used in the process.