This assessment was guided by the scientific and technical literature, consultation with experts, and a review of existing databases of exposure assessment.
The exposure-based assessment has been carried out for only these three risk factors because they were the only ones with both a method for quantified estimation of health impacts and global databases of exposure assessment available.
The linkage was evaluated by looking at linkage rate, characteristics of linked and non-linked cases, first trimester exposure rates for six groups of medicines according to the prescription data and information on medication use registered in the CA databases, and agreement of exposure.
The organ impairment and drug drug interaction (OI-DDI) database is the first rigorously assembled database of pharmacokinetic drug exposure data from publicly available renal and hepatic impairment studies presented together with the maximum change in drug exposure from drug interaction inhibition studies.
10 This is the first rigorously assembled database of pharmacokinetic drug exposure from publically available renal and hepatic impairment studies.
Second, there is also the possibility of inaccuracy of information in the database (e.g., misclassification of exposure and outcome, ascertainment bias, etc).
However, the development of exposure databases that are fit for the purpose of risk assessments across geographic scales and for different hazards and types of risks represents a significant challenge.
The regular completion, update, and improvement of exposure databases for both the water and sewage network and the public and private buildings in any city, is a high priority task for which the needed economic resources should be allocated.
An important area of research is the development of exposure databases from remote sensing satellites and computer-based techniques such as crowd-sourcing and drones that can provide highly accurate descriptions of population distributions and physical attributes of the natural and built environment.
The development of exposure databases has always constituted a great challenge in modeling disaster risk because, in most cases, in order to complete the identification and characterization process, data from several sources need to be combined, leading to a process where assumptions and simplifications are usually required.
