User:Yilloslime/Exposure factors

Exposure factors are physiological data used by scientists and public health officials to assess exposure to chemicals. Some of the most important and commonly used exposure factors are body weight, food and water intake, and breathing rate data. Exposure factors are most often used to estimate the dose of a chemical received by a person or animal from the amount of that chemical present in the environment. For example, if a city's drinking water was known to be contaminated with a potentially dangerous chemical, and officials wanted to estimate how much of the chemical residents were ingesting, they would need two pieces of information: the concentration of the chemical in the water, and the average amount of water a person drinks each day. The later datum is the exposure factor.

Body weight
http://www.epa.gov/ncea/efh/pdfs/efh-chapter07.pdf