Nearly 20 years ago, when epidemiologists had little choice but to embrace such vague exposure characterizations as “low,” “medium,” and “high,” we felt we could do better. When faced with insufficient contemporaneous data, our firm developed techniques and methodologies for reconstructing occupational or environmental exposures that occurred 10-90 years ago. We rely both upon our industrial hygiene experience as well as available oral and written information to leverage data from analogous work situations in order to replicate exposure scenarios, and thereby correctly approximate the magnitude of worker or consumer exposures.

In some cases, reviewing available historical medical data will allow us to conduct epidemiological studies; in others, our results can be used to support expert witness testimony and refute “theoretical” calculations that are often without scientific foundation or too uncertain to be reliable.