Training workshop on the updated WHO human health risk assessment toolkit for chemical hazards

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Regional Centre for Environmental Health Action

Training workshop on the updated WHO human health risk assessment toolkit for chemical hazards

21 July 2022 – WHO released recently the second version of its human health risk assessment toolkit for chemical hazards. The Regional Centre for Environmental Health Action (CEHA), in collaboration with the Chemical Safety and Health Programme at WHO headquarters, organized a virtual training workshop on the updated toolkit on 23, 30 June and 7 July 2022. The workshop was attended by 30 chemical safety and health experts from ministries of health and environment, poison control centres and academic institutions from: Egypt, Iraq, Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Pakistan and Tunisia.

The toolkit provides road maps for conducting a human health risk assessment, identifies the information that must be gathered to complete a risk assessment, and provides links to international resources from which the user can obtain information and methods that are essential for conducting a human health risk assessment.

The 3-day workshop was a mixture of technical presentations, plenary discussions and group work sessions provided by WHO technical staff and international risk assessment trainers from Chulabhorn Research Institute, Karolinska Institutet, University of Ottawa, Asia Pacific Association of Medical Toxicology, and external consultants.

The main objectives of the workshop were to provide:

basic principles of human health risk assessment of chemical hazards;

in-depth description of toolkit roadmap, including problem formulation, hazard assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization;

available tools, international resources and essential methods to conduct human health risk assessment;

practical exercises and case studies.

During the workshop, participants and facilitators made some recommendations to enhance the quality of regional and national human health risk assessment for chemical hazards and ways to integrate it with other components of the risk analysis cycle (risk management and risk communication).

In addition, they raised the need to identify human health risk assessment priorities and properly address risk assessment problem jointly with ministries of health at the regional and national levels.

Training materials and summary report are available upon request at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it