Comments on Airport Remediation Following a Chemical Terrorist Attack Articles

I am pleased that the two articles on Airport Remediation following a Chemical Terrorist Attack are being published in the Journal of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment since that will make them available to a larger audience and facilitate updating. Agency guideline reports tend to be shelved and forgotten and the two articles in this report should avoid that fate since they are much more than remediation guidelines. The first article briefly summarizes the toxicology and the history of previous exposure scenarios with chemical warfare (CW) agents and provides a basis for the decision criteria outlined in the second article. The development of the methodology used in this process will be of particular interest to risk assessors but these articles will also be of interest to researchers who have worked with chemical warfare agents and irritant chemicals. I was particularly interested in the documentation of persistence of CW agents on different surfaces and the reliability of extrapolating information from a relatively small group of agents and other readers will find useful information in the data base in these articles.