Again, this lecture is on health risk assessment (RA) and epidemiology. Much of this linkage can be summarized in the flowchart presented here. This flowchart was presented in the last lecture on RA and toxicology, where the impacts and effects involved in some cases are necessarily different since toxicologic studies by design are different from epidemiologic investigations. For those students who would like to appreciate more about the linkages depicted in this flowchart, they are referred to Lecture 3.

As mentioned earlier in the title slide of this lecture (and in the last overview slide of the last lecture), if epidemiologic studies on health effects were ethical and as readily available as animal studies and in vitro assays are, there would be no need to provide the last lecture relating RA specifically to toxicology. Nor would there be a need to separate toxicologic experiment from human testing. We already know from the start that epidemiologic data are most direct for RA, but for ethical and resource reasons such are often unattainable.

In this lecture, the discussion will be more focused and specific, at the expense of a broader, more general presentation already given in Lecture 3. Topics to be discussed here include: (1) The recent epidemiologic advances that are pertinent to RA; (2) the epidemiologic approaches used to conduct exposure assessment and risk factor measurement that are specific to the epidemiologic specialties involved; and (3) the use of biomarkers, which is not only a recent advance but also a subject specifically related to human exposure assessment.