Sustainable Environmental Engineering

2Health Risk Assessment

If the Earth were sick, nobody would be healthy.

OBJECTIVES

• To explore environmental health problems and environmental standards
• To identify the leadership role of SEE designer to achieve sustainable development goals of the United Nations
• To explain the US EPA Stage 2 Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rules
• To conduct human health risk assessment of carcinogenic and noncarcinogenic chemicals
• To present method to calculate benchmark dose (BMD) of any pollutants by the US EPA BMDS 2.6.0.1 software
• To describe qualitative and quantitative methods of characterizing the uncertainty in exposure assessments
• To demonstrate regression analysis in developing QSAR models by using SPSS or SAS
• To quantify uncertainty and sensitivity in health risk assessment using Monte Carlo simulation with Crystal Ball

2.1 Environmental Health

Human footprints on the nature significantly deteriorate the environmental quality of air, water, and soil, pose a great threat to human health and reduce human life expectancy. Taking air pollution as an example, the primary and secondary ambient air standards of particulate matter of diameter 2.5 µm (PM_2.5) in the United States are 12 and 15 µg/m³, respectively (US EPA, 2016). The corresponding standards of PM_2.5 in China are set at 15 and 30 µg/m³, respectively (China MEP, 2016). However, the average concentration of PM_2.5 for 10 provinces in China was greater than 55 (µg/m³) in 2015. According to the data from the Administration ...