How to evaluate toxicant exposures.

Abstract

Susceptibility of individual animals to any specific toxicant is influenced by many factors, including genetics, environment, age, gender, and preexisting disease. Because the relative influence of these factors on a specific toxicosis is often unknown and unmeasured, it is difficult to predict how an individual animal is likely to respond to a toxic challenge compared with the "average" animal in the population. Safety or uncertainty factors of 10 have been proposed to deal with intraspecies and interspecies variability in regard to LD50 values. These safety factors may be too conservative for many situations. Toxicant exposure is assessed in animals to determine if preventive treatment is warranted or for differential diagnosis purposes. Calculation techniques require converting English and apothecary units to metric units by either of several methods.