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ArticlePublication 2021Risk, Economics, and Decisions: Introduction
This article introduces the Risk Analysis special issue “Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions.” It …
This article introduces the Risk Analysis special issue “Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions.” It highlights core challenges associated with integrating risk assessment, economic evaluation, and uncertainty to inform policy decisions. The issue builds on a workshop convened to address these issues and to honor John S. Evans, whose thoughtful and innovative work has greatly benefitted the field. This article is part of the Risk Analysis special issue, “Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions” honoring…
Decision Analysis | Risk Analysis | Policy/Regulation -
ArticlePublication 2021Profile of John Evans
This profile discusses the career of Professor John Evans. It highlights his pioneering work in …
This profile discusses the career of Professor John Evans. It highlights his pioneering work in the fields of risk analysis, decision making, and uncertainty, his contributions to resolving many important environmental problems, and his major influence as a teacher and mentor. This article is part of the Risk Analysis special issue, “Risk Assessment, Economic Evaluation, and Decisions” honoring Professor John Evans. The special issue was guest edited by CHDS’ Deputy Director Lisa A. Robinson and…
Decision Analysis | Risk Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Evolving Science and Practice of Risk Assessment
This article addresses the need to incorporate recent conceptual and technological developments in risk assessment …
This article addresses the need to incorporate recent conceptual and technological developments in risk assessment into regulatory decision making. The authors argue that the typical “one chemical at a time” approach is inadequate to deal with the hundreds of thousands of chemicals in use and the reality that humans are exposed to many stressors throughout their lives. New concepts like the adverse outcome pathway, aggregate exposure pathway, exposome (total lifetime exposure), and sustainability offer the…
Decision Analysis | Risk Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Probabilistic Framework for Cancer Risk Management
This article presents a framework to integrate uncertainty and variability when estimating the effects of …
This article presents a framework to integrate uncertainty and variability when estimating the effects of changes in exposure, fatal and nonfatal cancer risk, years of life lost or lived with disability, and the monetary value of the risk reduction. The author illustrates the framework by evaluating the benefits of an occupational exposure limit for hexavalent chromium. Skewness in individuals’ exposure and susceptibility means that a small fraction of affected workers receive substantial benefits from limiting…
Probability/Bayes | Risk Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Policy/Regulation | Health/Medicine -
ArticlePublication 2021Advances in Probabilistic Dose-Response Assessment
This article describes a framework for characterizing the effects of chemical exposures on human health …
This article describes a framework for characterizing the effects of chemical exposures on human health developed by the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety. The framework provides a method for developing families of exposure-response functions (with confidence limits) indexed alternatively by the magnitude or probability of an adverse health effect. These functions are constructed using existing data on safety thresholds, supplemented by preliminary default distributions for interspecies dose conversion, uncertainty factors, and variability…
Probability/Bayes | Risk Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Accounting for Health Risk Inequality
This article describes the use of quantitative measures to characterize the effects of environmental regulation …
This article describes the use of quantitative measures to characterize the effects of environmental regulation on social inequality and its relationship to concerns about environmental justice. The author describes the available measures and finds that inequality of exposure is more easily assessed than inequality of health effects, as the latter requires information about between-group differences in vulnerability. Inequality measures have been used in several case studies. These have shown that when interventions can be targeted…
Risk Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Long-Term Mortality Effects of Fine Particles
This article reassesses a paper by Evans, Tosteson, and Kinney (1984) that evaluated how much …
This article reassesses a paper by Evans, Tosteson, and Kinney (1984) that evaluated how much credibility to place on earlier cross-sectional estimates of the mortality effects of particulate air pollution. Recognizing that cross-sectional estimates (based on aggregate mortality and air pollution in different cities) are ecological regressions and hence susceptible to unmeasured individual-level confounders, the author argues that Evans et al. demonstrated that cross-sectional estimates are within about a factor of two of the more-credible…
Risk Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Risk Screening for Consumer Products
This article presents and applies a framework for screening health risks from the 80,000 chemicals …
This article presents and applies a framework for screening health risks from the 80,000 chemicals contained in consumer products. The authors combine data from product sales, mass-balance-based exposure modeling, and dose-response functions based on chemical-specific toxicity data. They find that average daily exposures from common household products vary over six orders of magnitude. For a set of 5,500 chemical product combinations, doses range over nine orders of magnitude. Estimated risks are substantial for some household…
Risk Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation -
ArticlePublication 2021Health Benefits of Air Quality Warnings
This article explores the benefits of decreased mortality risk that could result from air quality …
This article explores the benefits of decreased mortality risk that could result from air quality warnings in three locations. It focuses on decreasing outdoor activities on days when air pollution exceeds a health-based standard for individuals aged 65 and over (who are more susceptible to associated mortality risks and may have more flexibility to adjust their daily activities). Adopting generally conservative assumptions, the authors find the value of the mortality risk reduction from shifting activities…
Risk Analysis | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Reducing Diesel Air Pollution in Mexico City
This article assesses the benefits and costs of a policy to retrofit diesel trucks and …
This article assesses the benefits and costs of a policy to retrofit diesel trucks and buses in Mexico City with diesel-particulate filters or oxidation catalysts. The authors differentiate among 45 vehicle classes (defined by vehicle type and model year/emission controls) and finds that retrofitting some type of emission-control equipment is with high probability cost-beneficial for almost all vehicle classes. Because of differences in the number and emissions of different vehicle types, most of the total…
Risk Analysis | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Chronic Disease/Risk | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2021Learning from John Evans
This article highlights four persistent challenges to risk-based decision making that the authors explored as …
This article highlights four persistent challenges to risk-based decision making that the authors explored as John Evans’ students: the possible existence of unidentified thresholds in dose-response functions, the lengthy process for establishing reference values for health effects with the result that such values exist for only a small fraction of chemicals used in commerce, difficulty in communicating and decision making because of uncertainty about which of several possible models of the relationship between exposure and…
Probability/Bayes | Value of Information | Risk Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment -
ArticlePublication 2020Premature Deaths, Statistical Lives, and Years of Life
This article clarifies some misconceptions about mortality risk and economic valuation. The mortality effects of …
This article clarifies some misconceptions about mortality risk and economic valuation. The mortality effects of exposure to environmental hazards such as air pollution are often described by the estimated number of “premature deaths” and the economic value of an exposure reduction as the number of “statistical lives saved” multiplied by the “value per statistical life.” These terms can be misleading because the number of deaths advanced by exposure cannot be determined from mortality data; it…
Preferences/Values | Health Outcomes | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Environmental Health | Policy/Regulation | College | Graduate | Critical Thinking/Analysis
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