Don’t Worry, Be Toxic?

In a paper to be published in Environmental Health Perspectives, studies are presented indicating that initiating precautionary measures for EMF exposures may trigger concerns, amplify perceptions of risks and reduce trust in public health protection.

Thankfully, I don’t appear to have much of a wingnut audience, so that the risk is small that someone will turn this into an endorsement of sound science. The authors make the point that the precautionary principle needs to be applied with some discretion, a view apparently shared by the World Health Organization.

I suspect that one of the causes for these findings is the enormous gulf between the scientists doing the risk assessments and the decision makers responsible for the risk management. Risk assessment and risk management are supposed to be distinct processes. However, risk assessors appear to have a problem in characterizing and synthesizing their findings in a manner that is usable to risk managers. Risk managers understanding of the issues of scientific uncertainty, cumulative risks, risk prioritization, etc. is often too limited to make the best use of risk information. Risk assessors who streamline and simplify their findings so much for the benefit of risk managers essentially are making policy choices about what information is used in decision making – becoming the risk managers themselves, a role they are not particularly suited to serve.

Back in the dimly-remember mid-1990s, several documents were published that discussed how the assessment of environmental health risks could be improved. One of these, “Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society” published in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), addresses the topic of using risk assessment to make better informed and more trustworthy decisions about human and environmental health risks. While the book focuses on the limitations of risk assessment that cause it to fall short of these expectations, it makes a key point that “[a]cceptance of risk decisions by a broad spectrum of the interested and affected parties is usually critical to their implementation”.

The lessons don’t seem to have taken. And I guess ignorance is bliss.