IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans
Source Description
List Description
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organization. One of its roles is to provide expert, independent, scientific opinion on environmental causes of cancer. IARC evaluates environmental agents and classifies their level of cancer hazard based on the weight of scientific evidence. These evaluations are published in a series called IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans.
IARC classifies environmental agents in the following groups:
- Group 1: The agent is carcinogenic to humans.
- Group 2A: The agent is probably carcinogenic to humans.
- Group 2B: The agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans.
- Group 3: The agent is not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans.
- Group 4: The agent is probably not carcinogenic to humans.
For a more in-depth explanation of the IARC Monographs and what the classifications mean, please read the Preamble to the IARC Monographs. For each chemical listed here, a link is provided to the relevant monograph.
List Methodology
Note: As of 2011-09-19, only Groups 1, 2A and 2B are indexed in Plum.
The list of classified agents, including CASRN for most substances, was obtained from the IARC website. Fields were included to specify the volume(s) of IARC Monographs describing the evaluation of each substance, and the year of the last published monograph. Note that IARC often re-evaluates agents; planned (future) publications are listed in the volumes field when known in advance, but not reflected in the date of listing.
To provide relevant links for each agent to the online (PDF) versions of IARC Monographs, fields were added to contain URLs for the most recent available volume of Monographs and (where possible) for the most recent individual monograph. Some volumes are only available as a single PDF file containing multiple monographs.
The 1987 IARC publication Supplement 7: Overall Evaluations of Carcinogenicity: An Updating of IARC Monographs Volumes 1 to 42 lists a subset of previously evaluated agents for which classifications were summarized, but for which no substantive information was presented. For these agents, Supplement 7 is referenced and linked as the latest relevant volume, but the earlier evaluations (namely from volumes 1 - 42) are linked as sources of specific monographs.