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Risk Assessment and Its Social and Regulatory Contexts
This chapter provides an overview of the origins and uses of quantitative risk assessment and the problems associated with it. Historical perspective is offered to aid understanding of how a method infused with so much uncertainty has still come to be seen by many as useful. Some attention is devoted to the important questions of how risk assessment has been used in decision-making and whether its use has improved decisions. The issues of public acceptance of the method and the degree to which decisions based on it are seen to provide adequate protection of the public health are also addressed. This chapter lists the major criticisms of risk assessment and the ways in which its results have been used, thus providing the justification for the selection of issues discussed in the succeeding chapters.
General Concepts
This section briefly discusses some basic definitions and concepts concerning human-health risk assessment, its content, and its relationships to research and to decision-making. The definitions and concepts were first systematically formulated by a National Research Council committee in a report issued in 1983, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process. The Red Book had a major influence on the practice of risk assessment and will be discussed extensively in this section of the report.
What is Risk Assessment?
Human-health risk assessment entails the evaluation of scientific information on the hazardous properties of environmental agents and on the extent of
