Evidence from Toxicology: The Most Essential Science for Prevention

The most essential goal of medicine and public health is to prevent harm (primum non nocere). This goal is only fully achieved with primary prevention, which requires us to identify and prevent harms prior to human exposure through research and testing that does not involve human subjects. For that reason, public health policies place considerable reliance on nonhuman toxicological studies. However, toxicology as a field has often not produced efficient and timely evidence for decision making in public health. In response to this, the U.S. National Research Council called for the adoption of evidence-based methods and systematic reviews in regulatory decision making. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) have recently endorsed these methods in their assessments of safety and risk.