Risks, managing expectation assessment

The quartet of risk assessment chapters is followed by a look at the risk management practices of regulators and the ways in which risk assessment results are used. As is expected, the concluding chapter looks to the future. 

Combined exposures from all media at their respective guidance values over a lifetime would be expected to be without appreciable health risk. The aim of a guidance value is to provide quantitative information from risk assessment for risk managers to enable them to make decisions concerning the protection of human health. 

Determine whether there are more cost-effective alternatives to additional data generation and risk assessment refinements. What-if analyses can be used to examine the savings in risk management that might result from additional data generation. Techniques that may be suitable for this include Bayesian Monte Carlo and expected value of information (EVOI) analysis (Dakins et al. 1996). 

Risk managers are interested in both variability and uncertainty they want to know how the expected impacts will vary (how frequent and widespread will impacts be ), and they want to know how certain the assessment is (how sure are you, what are the confidence limits ). 

In the case of biological contamination, the identification of risk became obvious by experience, the risk assessment was made unambiguous by epidemiology, and the immediate and obvious effectiveness of the risk management decisions demonstrated their wisdom in the absence of elegant quantitative risk extrapolation models and projections of costs per case averted. Costs of water treatment and distribution became trivial relative to almost all other essential commodities, and in the public expectation the biological safety of drinking water became axiomatic. 

We all share the expectation that food will be safe to eat. However, the opportunities for food to become contaminated by chemicals at some stage in its production are legion. Nevertheless, incidents of chemical contamination are very rare and this is testimony to systems for risk assessment and risk management that are applied by food producers, processors and retailers. 

Exposure assessment is done under the strong assumptions that (1) an adequate model for exposure calculation is on hand and (2) sufficient data about all influential exposure factors are available. The calculation is a prognosis about the expected level of exposure or the burden. Direct methods of exposure assessment, such as personal sampling (air, radiation), duplicate studies (nutrition) and human biomonitoring, provide information on a measurement level. The exposure assessors and the risk managers should balance the reasons for using prognostic techniques instead of direct exposure measurement methods. Both should anticipate critical questions about the validity of the exposure assessment technique in the course of public risk communication. Questions heard by the authors from concerned persons include, for example ... 

REACH has provided a structure in which a well-informed chemicals risk management can be developed. In particular, it creates a legislative and regulatory framework for all substances in which the procurement of data for making reasonably reliable risk assessment is possible. But on the other hand, as we have seen, it does not require the creation of such data for all substances for which it is needed. This should be no surprise. The deficiencies in the previous system of chemicals regulation were so large that it would be unrealistic to believe that they could be solved in one single reform. It is only to be expected that there should be scope for improvement. A discussion is needed that identifies the most important of the potential improvements of the system, and in this spirit we would like to propose three important issues for the further development of REACH. 

The major change is in Section 4.3.1 - Environmental Aspects under ISO 14001 and Planning for hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control under OHSAS 18001. OHSAS is much more detailed and prescriptive in how hazards are identified, and how risks are identified, assessed and controlled compared to how aspects and impacts are managed under ISO 14001. The environmental benefits derived from implementation of ISO14001 would similarly be expected to be realized by including occupational health and safety into the applicability of an environmental management system. For the record, many organizations have chosen to add occupational health and safety into the scope of their ISO 14001 EMS. 

For those readers desiring more details on risk assessment and risk management, Appendix A of the National Research Council (NRC) report Risk Assessment and Management at Deseret Chemical Depot and the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility (NRC, 1997) develops the bases for the presentations of risk (risk profiles and expected fatalities), explains how to interpret the results, and discusses various measures according to which risks can be compared. 

The permanent network proposal puts no restrictions whatsoever on membership of the future network. It would ideally embrace all interested stakeholders dealing with emerging substances - whether in studying their occurrence and effects or risk assessment and risk management. Still, the key members are expected to be mainly i) competent authorities/reference laboratories, i.e. institutes/organisations designated by the competent authorities at the national level to offer technical and scientific support in specific fields related to environmental protection ii) research centres and academia iii) industry stakeholders and iv) government institutions and standardisation bodies. 

Two key risk factors (experience and expectations) associated with different types of new employee have been identified. In the remainder of this chapter, I offer suggestions of how these risks can be assessed and managed. Given the vast variability in circumstance that is likely to be associated with readers of this work, it must be noted that individuals adopting the approaches outlined below may need to tailor them to their specific circumstances. However, in the main, the general principles and processes should hold for most, if not all, organizations. 

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