Numbers of chemicals used in consumer products like cosmetics and personal care products, household cleaning agents, textiles etc. are found to have negative impacts on human health. Some substance classes show endocrine disrupting activity, which apart from health concerns raises many questions related to some paradigms of classical risk assessment, like the appropriate consideration of u-shaped dose-response curves and the lag times between exposure and effect as well as mixture effects. In order to quantify the consumer risk associated with endocrine disrupting chemicals (apart from toxicological effects) consumer exposure has to be assessed. It is not clear, which substance or substance class is associated with the highest risk. In parts, this uncertainty is due to a lack of exposure data - both on the side of total exposure accessible with biomonitoring in blood or urine and on the side of investigating source contributions with exposure modeling. With the human fertility study of Fondation Faber (Crausaz et al., 2008) and the associated biomonitoring on EDC information on the relevance of certain substances or classes will be available. For the substances, that are found to be correlated with human infertility it will be important to assess the relevance of different sources and, if substance classes are found to be correlated with infertility markers, to assess the cumulative exposure to the mixture. In the group of Prof K. Hungerbuhler the source contributions to total consumer exposure have already been assessed for the EDC phthalates (Wormuth et al., 2006), for Bisphenol A (von GOtz et al., 2010) and for the widely used flame retardants polybrominated diethyl ethers PBDE (Trudel et al., 2010). The first part of the project want to focus on consumer exposure modeling for important UV filters used in C&PCP, which latter represent the most relevant product class for consumer exposure to UV-filters. Results shall be compared to biomonitoring data for human breast milk, that are being analyzed in a project by EMPA and FOPH (Amberg, 2010, pers. comm.) In the second part of the PhD-project we want to assess the total consumer exposure to a substance (class) that is correlated with human infertility (results of Faber Study) and provide information on relevant consumer exposure sources for this/these chemicals.
