Question: What is a good resource for learning about chemical and toxicological information?

gretchengehrke is asking a question about resources
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by gretchengehrke | March 21, 2018 18:18 | #15992


Is there a publicly available resource that has easily searchable chemical and toxicological information about toxic substances? It would be great to be able to learn about how specific chemicals behave in the environment and how they may affect human and ecological health.



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The EPA has created a comprehensive database for physical, chemical, and toxicological data for hundreds of thousands of chemicals: https://comptox.epa.gov.

You can click on the "Chemical Properties" tab to learn about things like whether a chemical is hydrophobic or hydrophilic, if it's volatile, etc. You can click on the "Env. Fate/Transport" to learn about things like how reactive it is in the atmosphere, whether or not it's likely to be metabolized, whether or not it bioaccumulates, etc. It includes exposure guidelines under "Hazard" and common products that contain it (and are an exposure pathway) under "Exposure."

Check it out! https://comptox.epa.gov. I'm hoping to create some user guides to make it more accessible to folks without a chemistry background to understand what the categories of data mean -- is anyone interested in collaborating on this??

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