Toxicological Information Literacy Protects Human Health

ABSTRACT

Chemicals are used extensively in modern societies. Evidence-based, updated safety information is necessary for using chemicals correctly and for protecting the health of humans and environment. This paper describes safety information life cycle of chemicals and highlights why it is important that individuals need to acquire critical toxicological information literacy skills to identify reliable information. Six competence standards of toxicological information literacy are defined according to the principles of the Association of College and Research Libraries. We also discuss the reliability of open access information sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Access to information
• chemical safety
• hazardous substances
• information literacy
• information storage and retrieval
• toxic actions

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Markku Pasanen for valuable and constructive comments and Dr. Ewen MacDonald for the linguistic advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).