Projects - PRA Center of CNY




	Indoor Air Exposure Database
	In a collaborative effort with Colden Corporation - a local small business - and NYIEQ, a unique database of common indoor air pollutants was created by compiling all data available from public databases and the open scientific literature. The database contains thousands of concentration measurements and emission rates for common, potentially toxic compounds, including volatile organic compounds released from domestic water use, household building materials, and consumer products. The database may be used to test predictive exposure models and quantify source contributions to total exposure. Ultimately, improving access to reliable exposure information will be an important step towards creating healthy indoor environments through greener building designs and cost-effective remediation strategies. The goal of future activities of the PRA Center will be to demonstrate successful applications of the database.
	Soil Half-life of Pesticides
	An important factor in the environmental fate and transport of many potentially toxic chemicals is the persistence in soil, referred to as the soil half-life. Shorter half-lives are indicative of increased rates of microbiological activity, chemical reactivity, and/or physical transport processes. For well-studied chemicals, a wide variety of values may be reported in the literature, sometimes with redundant cross references to secondary sources that summarize the same primary literature. A database was developed for a dozen pesticides, consisting of reported soil half-lives and study conditions from only the primary literature. Statistical summaries are presented, including recommendations for probability distributions corresponding to specific ranges of conditions (e.g., soil types, pH, climate, etc.). The goal of future activities will be to expand the database to include additional chemicals as well as to demonstrate applications of the information in probabilistic exposure models.
	Human Health Exposure Variables
	While there is no single ranking of the importance of exposure variables that applies in all cases, there are a small subset of variables that tend to be more influential in a risk assessment due to the high variability among individuals and/or high uncertainty in available study data. Research on the development of probability distributions was initiated for two such exposure variables: soil ingestion rate and fish ingestion rate. The goal of future activities is to publish recommended distributions and expand the database to include additional examples for other influential variables.

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