On Hold

Generally, I’m not a prolific business traveler, averaging six to eight trips per year. This year, I’ll have logged eight trips before June, most of them since the end of April. Since I haven’t been a power-traveler, I’ve been indifferent to the things available to marginally ease the burdens of air travel, such as accumulating frequent flyer miles for the occasional upgrade to a seat designed for a normally-proportioned male (the folks who get affordable first class seats via upgrade must rack up an astounding number of air miles per year). Losing 40 pounds was helpful in getting me to fit width-wise into economy- or business-class seats, but it isn’t much help in the other direction – airlines must use the same assumptions as risk assessors which is that we all weigh 70 kg, and are all around 175 cm in height; that’s 154 lbs in weight, 5 ft, 9 in tall, for my not-so-oppressively scientific readers. Please help me understand why economy-class seats are thought to be designed for someone over six feet tall. The 30 percent of Americans with BMIs greater than 30 must truly suffer on airplanes.

I’ve found airline passenger health and comfort to be good exercise in the assessment (or lack thereof) of cumulative and aggregate risks. A few years ago, ASHRAE published a study concluding that most airline passengers rated cabin air quality high, better than building air quality. William Nazaroff at UC Berkeley, in testimony before Congress a few years later, provides a more nuanced contrast and suggests cabin air quality might be a factor in numerous complaints but that too much uncertainty exists in the available data. However, when you overlay this with indoor air quality in the terminal or hotels, outdoor air quality at airports from all of the partially-combusted hydrocarbons, potential for disease transmission due to crowding, crummy airport terminal food (airports are nutritional dead zones if you are truly trying to eat properly; thankfully, airlines have stopped trying to feed you on the planes, as an economy move), limited opportunities for exercise, non-ergonomically designed seats both in planes and terminals, noise and vibration, stress and boredom (let’s hear it for airports with wireless), you would think that clearly air travel potentially presents some health challenges. Even if these were assessed, I’m not holding my breath that anything would be done about it, in the absence of an alternate mode of long-distance travel. However, would it kill airports to subsidize concessions that stock fresh vegetables; would it really kill airlines to pull a few rows of seats out to give economy-class passengers a few more inches of legroom?

Travel and work have been putting other aspects of life on hold, such as the blog. I like the description of work life provided by Jen over at The News Blog: “a slow motion riot in a crowded white-collar asylum”. I know that feeling. Some tidbits I’ve encountered over the past month, which I present in lieu of one of several only partially-completed posts:

I checked out the NAS TCE web site, to see if there’s an update on when the report will be released. There seems to have been a note added recently saying that the project duration has been extended, and that the report is expected to be issued “summer 2006”, which could mean anytime up to mid-September. Originally, the project duration was 18 months starting from September 2004, which meant the report was supposed to be out very soon. I don’t know what’s up – I’m not in that kind of loop.

I’ve been reading Selling Sickness, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. It chronicles the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, physicians and medical researchers, describing how that industry has worked together to broaden the definition of “illness” to increase market share for drugs. It’s quite good, and may challenge you to rethink your relationship with doctors in general.

The OMB’s draft bulletin on risk assessment started me on a journey exploring the state of the practice under the current political climate. I’ve had a chance to compare the different viewpoints of stakeholders such as the American Chemistry Council (current regulatory risk assessments are far too conservative) and Adam Finkel (no they aren’t). The OMB comes out on the side of the ACC, of course. I haven’t had any luck finding Dr. Finkel’s article “Is Risk Assessment Really Too Conservative? Revising the Revisionists” from the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law in 1989, but he’s got a later version published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 (they nick you $8 for it) titled engagingly 'Disconnect brain and repeat after me: "risk assessment is too conservative"'. Looking at these arguments again, it interesting to see how little risk assessment has transformed in the past 10 years. It may have even lost some ground, intellectually.

I’m back on the road for the next two weeks, so posting will continue to be intermittent.