Methodological approaches and practices for assessing consumers' health risks caused by durable goods (on the example of construction and finishing materials)

The article deals with an issue related to risk assessment as a criterion of durable consumer goods safety for population health; construction materials and finishing materials are a very relevant example of such goods. We showed that legislative and methodological grounds for assessing such risks were not sufficient. So we developed approaches to risk assessment on the basis of evolution models which allowed to examine risks growth under chronic exposure. We revealed that even if certain goods conformed to sanitary standards set forth by technical regulations they could still cause unacceptable health risks for consumers. And the risks tended to grow dramatically when several goods with similar or identical hazardous effects were consumed together. We performed epidemiologic and profound medical-biological examinations and obtained authentic mathematical dependencies of correlation between exposure and consumer health disorders; these models are adequate to the data taken from relevant scientific literature. We tested methodological approaches to application of the detected "dose - effect" dependencies for evolution modeling. These approaches were tried out in real-life situations when certain construction and finishing materials were used in precast frame low-rise housing construction. We proved that long living in houses which were built with the use of 7-8 and more polymer-containing materials formed unacceptable risks for citizens' health after 10-12 years. The results we obtained helped to justify a decision that people should moved houses as it was unacceptable to live in them any longer; it was also considered inadvisable to use newly-built and still uninhabited houses of the studied lines for constant living. Basically, these methodical approaches can be applied in assessing risks caused by a wide range of durable consumer goods.