SADA provides a human health risk assessment module to calculate the risk of adverse health impacts on a population exposed to toxic chemicals found in groundwater, surface water, soil, and sediment. It also calculates risk-based screening values to quickly identify contaminants of concern. These results are integrated into the other modules, such as cost benefit analysis, geospatial analysis, and sampling schemes.
Before this module can be implemented, the user must provide the correct media identification for the data when creating a SADA file. Without media identification, SADA will not be able to setup this module. Furthermore, SADA expects the measurement units for radionuclides to be in pCi/g for Soil/Sediment and pCi/L for Surface water/Groundwater. Units for nonradionuclides must be in mg/kg for Soil/Sediment and mg/L for Surface water/Groundwater. See Data Requirements. In addition, the user must have a toxicological database and a scenario parameter database to associate with the data. SADA provides two such databases called ToxicologicalProfiles.mdb and ScenarioParameters.mdb; the user may customize these databases in Microsoft Access. During the risk module setup, SADA will extract relevant information from these databases to incorporate in the SADA file. SADA will not use the databases again unless prompted; however, the information extracted from the databases may be edited within SADA. Note: this does not affect the external risk databases.