Types of Risk

There are two major types of risk pure risks and speculative risks. Pure risks only offer the prospect of loss and speculative risks offer both a chance of gain, or loss. A speculative risk could be the purchasing of stock or investing money in real estate, etc. 

---

Insurance is protec tion against risk. Commercial insurance companies minimize their own risks by covering a large number of individuals against a given risk and also by offering coverage on a wide variety of different types of risk. It is frequently quite difficult to assess the probability of success of a particular research and development project. It is much easier for an insurance company to assess its probabih-ties from its casualty tables. 

QRA can be used to investigate many types of risks associated with chemical process facilities, such as the risk of economic losses or the risk of environmental impact. But, in health and safety applications, the use of QRA can be classified into two categories ... 

Just-in-time supply of materials may affect the mode of transportation and could increase risks from the material. For example, drums of a chemical could be stockpiled near a user and not be under the level of control that could be provided by either the supplier or user if the inventory were maintained in a storage tank at one or the other facility. This type of risk should be included when contemplating just-in-time shipments. 

The mechanisms behind the different types of risks are also quite varied, because manufacturers may apply different conditions and agents, and each manufacturing stage may involve different job functions and therefore different exposure conditions. Distance to emission sources and physical parameters such as rate of release, air currents, and meteorological variations have a profound influence. The variability of exposure conditions is made even greater by work patterns, individual practices, and simultaneous exposure to several substances acting together. 

It is important to remember that unexpected benefits may arise from integration. You should actively look for these benefits and document them. It may be possible to improve some of these benefits by small modifications to the plan or integration framework. Such additional work should be undertaken only with the appropriate approvals. Never the less, if any benefits would only be achieved with the integration project, you should include them in your overall statement of benefits. An example of this might be the better allocation of capital to risk reduction efforts when an integrated risk assessment is done-addressing several different types of risk. 

There me two major types of risk ina. imuin individual risk and population risk. Maximum risk is defined e.xacUy as it implies, Uiat is the ma.ximum risk to an individual person. Tliis person is considered to have a 70-year lifetime of exposure to a process or a chemical. Population risk is Uie risk to a population. It is expressed as a certain number of deaths per Uiousand or per million people. For example, a fatal annual risk of 2 x 10 refers to 2 deatlis per year for every million individuals. These risks are based on very conser ative assumptions, llich may yield too high a risk. 

No problems rank high in all four types of risk, or relatively low in all four... 

Risk characterization estimates tlie healtli risk associated with tlie process under investigation. The result of tliis cliaracterization is a number tliat represents tlie probability of adverse healtli effects from tliat process or from a substance released in tliat process. Tlie major types of risk include Individual Risk, Maximum Individual Risk (MIR), Population Risk (PR), Societal Risk, and Risk Indices. 

There is a continuing interest in the development of biomarker assays for use in environmental risk assessment. As discussed elsewhere (Section 16.6), there are both scientific and ethical reasons for seeking to introduce in vitro assays into protocols for the regulatory testing of chemicals. Animal welfare organizations would like to see the replacement of toxicity tests by more animal-friendly alternatives for all types of risk assessment—whether for environmental risks or for human health. 

As discussed in Chapter 4, some risk-based decision making can benefit by the development of tolerance criteria for the various types of risk to which building occupants may be exposed. When identified risks are higher than what can be deemed tolerable, they should be eliminated or reduced to control the company s risk exposure. The process of risk identification and evaluation, comparison to tolerance criteria, and elimination or reduction of intolerably high risk is known as risk management. Figure 6.1 illustrates this process. Application of these tolerance criteria helps protect building occupants and ensure that resources are appropriately applied. 

We shall review in Chapter 11 how this type of risk information is used in decisions about pharmaceutical use. 

Note that some of the risk information is actuarial (based on statistical data, typically collected and organized by insurance companies), and some of it has been derived from the type of risk assessment discussed in this book (chloroform in chlorinated drinking water, afla-toxin in peanut products). While the uncertainties associated with the figures in Table 11.2 are much greater for some risks than for others (not a trivial problem in presentation of risk data), such a presentation, it would seem, is helpful to people who are trying to acquire some understanding of extremely low probability events, of the order of one-in-one million. 

Training will be essential for the persons who are to implement the protocol. This training shall be given initially and regularly updated. It will combine theoretical aspects and especially practical situations consistent with the type of risk. 

The overall concept of all of the following tools is that of risk analysis or risk assessment. Risk analysis helps to decide whether an aspect is GMP-critical or not. The risk analysis can be performed in a formal or more informal way. Following are two popular and import types of risk analysis. Another method, the fault tree analysis (FTA), has recently been used in the area of computer validation. This method is not described here, as it is a complex form of risk analysis. 

There are four types of risk to plan around in developing your savings strategy ... 

There is a direct relationship between risk and the rate of potential return. Just like the lottery, when the potential return is high, so is the risk. You should understand the different types of risk and how they affect rates of return. Take only as much risk as you need to meet your savings goal. 

Since most codeine is dispensed as part of a compound preparation, potential side effects of the other drug(s) must also be considered. For instance, someone with stomach ulcers should not take codeine that is combined with a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) such as aspirin or ibuprofen. Another type of risk from a compound preparation relates to codeine abuse. For instance, a person who abuses codeine might routinely take a dose of 100-200 mg of codeine to produce noticeable euphoria. Using Tylenol 3 to obtain this dose would also mean ingesting 1,000-2,000 mg of acetaminophen. Taking that amount of acetaminophen for any extended period presents a risk for liver damage, especially in combination with alcohol. 

The environmental and occupational impacts from pesticide use may well represent the major types of risks posed by pesticides. In terms of public opinion in the US, however, the pesticide risks most commonly identified are those from consumer exposure to pesticide residues in foods. In a national consumer attitude survey performed annually in which respondents were asked to indicate the perceived magnitude of risk from pesticide residues in food, 72 to 82% of... 

PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) A family of chemicals composed of biphenyl molecules that have been chlorinated to varying degrees, performance assessment A type of risk assessment in which the potential long-term impacts of hazardous waste disposal on human health and the environment are evaluated for the purpose of determining whether disposal of specific wastes at specific sites should be acceptable, persistence The length of time that a contaminant persists in the environment. 

Although risk is inherent to some degree in all our activities, there are different types of risks that require different techniques to manage. Each risk should be evaluated individually as to which technique(s) would be the most appropriate for that given risk. 

Extrapolation methods are used for various types of risk assessment. Methods may be used in the process of deriving environmental quality objectives, in the registration of new substances, and in the process of site-specific risk assessment. Suter (1993) called these approaches prospective (the former 2) and retrospective (the latter) risk assessments. The specific process in which extrapolation methods are used has implications for the concepts to be applied and the data to be used as input in extrapolation. Strictly described approaches are in place for the derivation of environmental quality criteria (EQCs) and the registration of pesticides and newly developed substances. The prescribed approaches for deriving EQCs can differ between jurisdictions. The approaches for retrospective investigations have more degrees of freedom. A characteristic of the latter approach is that the methods can make use of measured local exposure levels and can estimate local risk with known precision (or known uncertainty ). The latter is uncommon for EQCs. 

---