Criteria for the assignment of skin notation: An international perspective [Criteri di assegnazione della skin notation in una prospettiva internazionale]

From the list of occupational exposure limits, skin notation (Sk) identifies chemicals that can be considered to be hazards through the skin. Hazard identification should be determined by the toxicity and dermal uptake of the compound. Obviously, exposure has to be assessed in any different working situation, while hazard identification can be considered as general information. At the moment there is no general agreement on the criteria of Sk assignment. In this process, dermal uptake seems to be systematically ignored, so hazard identification is based only on toxicological data. Recently, in the EDETOX project supported by the Fifth Framework Programme of EC (QLRT-2000-00196), a skin notation system was proposed where the degree of hazard is determined by two different types of information on the specific chemical: a) percutaneous penetration and b) toxicity. A new algorithm has been suggested for calculating a semi-quantitative skin notation.