Estimating the extent of the health hazard posed by high-production volume chemicals.

We used structure-activity relationship modeling to estimate the number of toxic chemicals among the high-production volume (HPV) group. We selected 200 chemicals from among the HPV chemical list and predicted the potential of each for its ability to induce a variety of adverse effects including genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, developmental, and systemic toxicity. We found a significantly less than expected proportion of toxic chemicals among the HPV sample when compared to a reference set of 10,000 chemicals representative of the universe of chemicals.