Uncertainties in Risk Assessment

Current risk assessment practices largely reflect the need for a consistent set of relatively rapid, first-cut procedures to assess 'plausible upper limits' of various risks. These practices have important roles to play in 1) screening candidate hazards for initial attention and 2) directing attention to cases where moderate-cost measures to control exposures are likely to be warranted, in the absence of further extensive (and expensive) data gathering and analysis. A problem with the current practices, however, is that they have led assessors to do a generally poor job of analyzing and expressing uncertainties, fostering 'One-Number Disease' (in which everything from one's social policy position on risk acceptance to one's technical judgment on the likelihood of different cancer dose-response relationships is rolled into a single quantity). At least for analyses that involve relatively important decisions for society (both relatively large potential health risks and relatively large potential economic costs or other disruptions), we can and should at least go one further step - and that is to assess and convey both a central tendency estimate of exposure and risk as well as our more conventional 'conservative' upper-confidence-limit values. To accomplish this, more sophisticated efforts are needed to appropriately represent the likely effects of various sources of uncertainty along the casual chain from the release of toxicants to the production of adverse effects. When the effects of individual sources of uncertainty are assessed (and any important interactions included), Monte Carlo simulation procedures can be used to produce an overall analysis of uncertainties and to highlight areas where uncertainties might be appreciably reduced by further study. Beyond the information yielded by such analyses for decision-making in a few important cases, the value of doing several exemplary risk assessments in. this way is that a set of benchmarks can be defined that will help calibrate the assumptions used in the larger number of risk assessments that must be done by 'default' procedures.