Enhancing Population’s Resistance to Toxic Exposures as an Auxilliary Tool of Decreasing Environmental and Occupational Health Risks (a Self-Overview)

摘要

Environment chemical pollution can be persistent, and even virtually irremovable. For some chemicals in the workplace environment reliably safe low exposure levels are technically unattainable or presumably nonexistent. As a supplement to decreasing harmful exposures to as low levels as possible, the “biological prophylaxis” aims at enhancing host’s protective mechanisms. During over 30 years in animal experiments modeling isolated or combined chronic or subchronic exposures to silica, asbestos, monazite, lead, chromium, arsenic, manganese, nickel, vanadium, nanosilver, nanocopper, formaldehyde, phenol, naphthalene, benzo(a)pyrene we tested so-called “bioprophylatic complexes” (BPCs) comprising innocuous substances with theoretically expected beneficial influence on the toxicokinetics and/or toxicodynamics of those toxics. The BPCs proved protectively effective in animal experiments were then subjected to controlled field trials on restricted groups of volunteers. Once the effectiveness and safety of a BPC was established, it was recommended for practical use, first of all, in the most vulnerable population groups (children, pregnant women) and in the most harmful occupations. At each stage of this work the effectiveness of the bioprophylactic approach to chemical risks management was successfully demonstrated. The BPCs tested up to now proved capable of mitigating systemic toxicity, cytotoxicity, fibrogenicity, and mutagenicity of the above-listed chemicals.