A Proposal to Develop a National Occupational Exposure Databank

The rationale and strategy to develop a national occupational exposure databank (NOED) are described. The NOED would support exposure assessment activities that are needed to accomplish risk assessment and risk management goals, including exposure assessment research, epidemiologic investigations, surveillance, and policy and program design and evaluation. By defining exposures and the parameters associated with them in various industries and jobs, the NOED would also focus increased attention on the need to reduce occupational health hazards. The proposed NOED would contain exposure measurements and information about exposure determinants, and it would rely initially on data from compliance-related activities in the federal sector. The criteria needed for an effective databank are discussed, along with the need to improve the methods now available to capture and code exposure determinants. Two steps to develop the NOED are proposed for immediate adoption: (1) the creation of an initial database by merging publicly available data; 2) a targeted research program to address potential biases and other imperfections in the data, and thus to optimize their usefulness. A third step is described as a starting point for discussion of the possible future expansion of the NOED to include data obtained from private employers.