The Importance of Economic Factors in Setting Combined Environmental Standards

Scientific enquiry seeks to reveal the nature and quality of combined exposures from pollutants observing how dose-response functions change for individual pollutants as the dose of other agents is varied. Having obtained values for a range of doses, one can then plot isoboles showing combinations of agents with equal impacts (on human health or on other categories of impact target). With deterministic impact phenomena, experimental and epidemiological studies aim to derive health safety thresholds. With stochastic impact phenomena there are no such thresholds, and efforts are restricted to deriving combined dose-response functions.