Newer paradigms and metrics are evolving to bypass animal testing, while maintaining the concept of toxicity endpoints.

[2] In Ancient Greek medical literature, the adjective τοξικόν (meaning "toxic") was used to describe substances which had the ability of "causing death or serious debilitation or exhibiting symptoms of infection.

"[3] The word draws its origins from the Greek noun τόξον toxon (meaning "arc"), in reference to the use of bows and poisoned arrows as weapons.

Archaeologists studying bone arrows from caves of Southern Africa have noted the likelihood that some aging 72,000 to 80,000 years old were dipped in specially prepared poisons to increase their lethality.

[6][7] The San people of Southern Africa have managed to preserved this practice into the modern era, with the knowledge base to form complex mixtures from poisonous beetles and plant derived extracts, yielding an arrow-tip product with a shelf life beyond several months to a year.

Examples include coal dust, asbestos fibres or finely divided silicon dioxide, all of which can ultimately be fatal if inhaled.

[9] Behavioral toxicity refers to the undesirable effects of essentially therapeutic levels of medication clinically indicated for a given disorder (DiMascio, Soltys and Shader, 1970).

For example, if a dose of a toxic substance is safe for a laboratory rat, one might assume that one-tenth that dose would be safe for a human, allowing a safety factor of 10 to allow for interspecies differences between two mammals; if the data are from fish, one might use a factor of 100 to account for the greater difference between two chordate classes (fish and mammals).

Similarly, an extra protection factor may be used for individuals believed to be more susceptible to toxic effects such as in pregnancy or with certain diseases.

This approach is very approximate, but such protection factors are deliberately very conservative, and the method has been found to be useful in a wide variety of applications.

Assessing all aspects of the toxicity of cancer-causing agents involves additional issues, since it is not certain if there is a minimal effective dose for carcinogens, or whether the risk is just too small to see.

Even more complex are situations with more than one type of toxic entity, such as the discharge from a malfunctioning sewage treatment plant, with both chemical and biological agents.

Skin corrosion from a substance must penetrate through the epidermis into the dermis within four hours of application and must not reverse the damage within 14 days.

[17] Hazards in the arts have been an issue for artists for centuries, even though the toxicity of their tools, methods, and materials was not always adequately realized.

TOXMAP's chemical and environmental health information is taken from NLM's Toxicology Data Network (TOXNET)[20] and PubMed, and from other authoritative sources.

Aquatic toxicity testing subjects key indicator species of fish or crustacea to certain concentrations of a substance in their environment to determine the lethality level.

Toxicity of a substance can be affected by many different factors, such as the pathway of administration (whether the toxicant is applied to the skin, ingested, inhaled, injected), the time of exposure (a brief encounter or long term), the number of exposures (a single dose or multiple doses over time), the physical form of the toxicant (solid, liquid, gas), the concentration of the substance, and in the case of gases, the partial pressure (at high ambient pressure, partial pressure will increase for a given concentration as a gas fraction), the genetic makeup of an individual, an individual's overall health, and many others.

Considering the limitations of the dose-response concept, a novel Abstract Drug Toxicity Index (DTI) has been proposed recently.