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662 HAZWOPER for General Site Workers III
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Types of Toxicology

Toxicology can be divided into six applied areas - clinical, forensic, analytical, environmental, occupational, and regulatory.

  1. Environmental and occupational toxicology are self-explanatory because it deals with toxic hazards in the environment and in the workplace, respectively.
  2. Regulatory toxicology focuses on laws and regulations and their enforcement, an important component of toxicology. It establishes standards for the amount of chemicals permitted in ambient air, industrial atmospheres, and drinking water. Risk assessment is often considered a part of regulatory toxicology.
  3. Descriptive toxicology is concerned with testing to provide information for safety evaluation and regulatory requirements.
  4. Clinical toxicology is the diagnosis and treatment of human poisoning, and forensic toxicology, the medical-legal aspects of clinical poisoning.
  5. Forensic toxicology deals with the medical-legal aspects of clinical poisoning.
  6. Analytical toxicology is concerned with the identification and quantification of toxic chemicals in biological materials.

Accurate predictions of effects of chemicals on humans depend upon scientific studies. Most toxicological studies are empirical in nature, and are performed on experimental animals (in vivo) or in vitro test systems (i.e., cell culture or other systems used to mimic the results in part of a living organism).

Since the results are often used for regulatory purposes, the goal of such studies is to predict effects in humans.

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.

4-2. What is the goal of toxicological studies?