ARIES: System for Health effects Assessment in industrial risk

In this work we present a general description of ARIES*, a tool designed in order to support the assessment of expected health effects derived from an accidental release of toxic compounds. ARIES includes two sequential and complementary steps. The first one (a quantitative phase) is being developed. for inhalation exposures, using numerical models, empirical correlations, physiological parameters and toxicological index, to estimate short term consequences over the exposed population. Next it will be published a new report were It will be described with detail the procedure designed to the quantitative assessment of the exposure. The system starts the assessment process with values of external concentrations which are processed, together with different exposure values (existing for humans and scaled up irom animals), as inputs for different kinds of models. From these, and other physiological values ARIES calculates the inhaled equivalent doses and the expected associated effects as a function of the exposure limes. Once overcome this first step, ARIES is complemented with an additional system that executes the selection of relevant information from toxicological data bases (qualitative phase). The system works , applying a string of filters and searches that displays selected Information, giving an additional support to the assessment. Both steps, just referred, are integrated into a logical informatics support. The informatics code is developed in dbase language even for the design of the procedure as for the mathematical models linked to the system ( extrapolation, dose inhaled models, etc.) to execute the numerical analysis of the assessment. The system has been designed in order to include progressively new chemicals and the improvements obtained in the development of mathematical models related with dose-effect relationships. At this moment, is programmed a first prototype of ARIES that can be executed in PC's and it can run for several products. (Application lo Industrial Risk for Health Effects Assessment) (Author)