Industrial health risk assessment: Industrial hygiene for technology transition

There have been a number of recent incentives and legislative pressures to include the risk assessment process in industrial hygiene practice. This pressure arises in part from the need for risk managers to prioritize risk mitigation activities in the face of limited resources. To optimize a risk management program, a broad characterization of risks to exposed populations provides more information for risk-benefit-cost scenarios than does compliance assessment alone. In this article a paradigm for industrial health risk assessment (IHRA) is proposed as a framework for manufacturing process risk assessment that can readily interface with risk management objectives. While the IHRA model is built on the terminology and ideas expressed in the National Academy of Sciences risk assessment paradigm from 1983, it has been modified to better represent the practice of industrial hygiene.