Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts blog

Assessing exposure is an important aspect of complying with the EU REACH regulations.  In the pharmaceutical industry accurately determining occupational exposure to API can be difficult due to the nature of the pharmaceutical process.  There are modelling tools available to help give confident assessments of exposure, one of the most sophisticated of which is the Advanced REACH Tool (ART).

In this HOT paper Patricia McDonnell (National University of Ireland Galway) and colleagues from across Europe have optimised ART to model airborne exposure of workers in the pharmaceutical industry, by refining and validating the inhalable dust algorithm.

If you’re interested in evaluating exposure assessment models why not download the paper – it’s free to access for 4 weeks:

Validation of the inhalable dust algorithm of the Advanced REACH Tool using a dataset from the pharmaceutical industry
Patricia E. Mc Donnell, Jody M. Schinkel, Marie A. Coggins, Wouter Fransman, Hans Kromhout, John W. Cherrie and Erik L. Tielemans
J. Environ. Monit., 2011, 13, 1597-1606
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM10189G