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The last 9 lectures together provide an overview of the linkages among public health, health risk assessment (RA), toxicology, and epidemiology, with the first 4 being more philosophical and the last 3 relatively more quantitative in nature. The 2 lectures presented in-between (Lectures 5 and 6) utilized 6 actual epidemics cases to provide a historical perspective of toxicologic epidemiology, which is defined in this series as the study of the frequency and distribution of adverse human health effects caused or modified by toxic agents or harmful materials.

The real intent of this series of lectures is, nonetheless, not an attempt to offer a historical perspective of toxicologic epidemiology, but rather a sense of where, what, and how this infant is growing into. This will be the focus of discussion in the next and final lecture of this series. Also to be discussed in Lecture 10 are some of the career opportunities for those health scientists wishing to work in this discipline, or for those already in some subareas of this discipline.

RA is both a public health discipline and a quantitative process. As the latter, it includes human exposure assessment (HEA), toxicity assessment (TA), and health risk characterization. To a great extent, the future direction of the research into RA, and hence into toxicologic epidemiology as well, is guided or governed by the issues centering around the many uncertainties inherent in HEA and TA, some of which were just discussed here in the present lecture.

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