Science and Decisions National Research Council; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology
09/2009
eBook
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Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the ...U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis.
However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment.
Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.
Gene Drives on the Horizon National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Board on Life Sciences ...
06/2016
eBook
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Research on gene drive systems is rapidly advancing. Many proposed applications of gene drive research aim to solve environmental and public health challenges, including the reduction of poverty and ...the burden of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue, which disproportionately impact low and middle income countries. However, due to their intrinsic qualities of rapid spread and irreversibility, gene drive systems raise many questions with respect to their safety relative to public and environmental health. Because gene drive systems are designed to alter the environments we share in ways that will be hard to anticipate and impossible to completely roll back, questions about the ethics surrounding use of this research are complex and will require very careful exploration.
Gene Drives on the Horizon outlines the state of knowledge relative to the science, ethics, public engagement, and risk assessment as they pertain to research directions of gene drive systems and governance of the research process. This report offers principles for responsible practices of gene drive research and related applications for use by investigators, their institutions, the research funders, and regulators.
Risk measures play a vital role in many subfields of economics and finance. It has been proposed that risk measures could be analysed in relation to the performance of variables extracted from ...empirical real-world data. For example, risk measures may help inform effective monetary and fiscal policies and, therefore, the further development of pricing models for financial assets such as equities, bonds, currencies, and derivative securities.<false,>A Special Issue of “Risk Measures with Applications in Finance and Economics” will be devoted to advancements in the mathematical and statistical development of risk measures with applications in finance and economics. This Special Issue will bring together the theory, practice and real-world applications of risk measures. This book is a collection of papers published in the Special Issue of “Risk Measures with Applications in Finance and Economics” for Sustainability in 2018.
This report represents the conclusions of a Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee convened to evaluate the safety of various food additives, with a view to recommending acceptable daily intakes (ADIs) and ...to preparing specifications for identity and purity. The first part of the report contains a general discussion of the principles governing the toxicological evaluation and assessment of intake of food additives. A summary follows of the Committee's evaluations of technical, toxicological and intake data for certain food additives: branching glycosyltransferase from Rhodothermus obamensis expressed in Bacillus subtilis, cassia gum, cyclamic acid and its salts (dietary exposure assessment), cyclotetraglucose and cyclotetraglucose syrup, ferrous ammonium phosphate, glycerol ester of gum rosin, glycerol ester of tall oil rosin, lycopene from all sources, lycopene extract from tomato, mineral oil (low and medium viscosity) class II and class III, octenyl succinic acid modified gum arabic, sodium hydrogen sulfate and sucrose oligoesters type I and type II. Specifications for the following food additives were revised: diacetyltartaric acid and fatty acid esters of glycerol, ethyl lauroyl arginate, glycerol ester of wood rosin, nisin preparation, nitrous oxide, pectins, starch sodium octenyl succinate, tannic acid, titanium dioxide and triethyl citrate. Annexed to the report are tables summarizing the Committee's recommendations for intakes and toxicological evaluations of the food additives considered.
"The CDC has made a revision in their philosophy underlying recommended prevention techniques to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. The new approach focuses on ""positive prevention"", that is, prevention ...among people living with HIV/AIDS. This important distinction has resulted in the need to reexamine the behaviors around HIV transmission and the approaches to prevention when working within this diverse population. Positive Prevention is a timely volume containing the latest contributions from the top scholars in the field on preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. Issues covered include unprotected sex with HIV-positive gay and bisexual men, issues around whether disclosure leads to safer sex, mental health and HIV with young adults, the impact of HIV diagnosis on sexual risk behaviors, interventions in community settings, and more. There is also a important chapter on international perspectives on ""positive prevention"". This volume will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for all professionals working in the field of HIV / AIDS prevention."
Will SARS or another pandemic influenza reoccur and, if it does, have we learned how to manage pandemics more effectively? In SARS Unmasked risk communication expert Michael Tyshenko offers answers ...to this and other questions. Cathy Paterson, who worked as a nurse clinician during the Toronto SARS crisis, adds an important view from the frontlines. Their analysis reveals an out-of-control situation with mixed risk communication messages, a lack of leadership, and an overwhelmed health care system that was unable to both cope with the crisis in Toronto and provide adequate support for their most valuable employees at the time - health care workers.
Under the impact of various uncertainties, the potential operation risk of the distribution network is gradually gaining more and more attention in both security and economy. To comprehensively ...determine the risk level, an operational risk assessment method considering multiple risk factors is proposed. Firstly, probabilistic models are established including temporal distributions of electric vehicles and uncertainties of renewable energy. Secondly, a time-sequential security risk assessment method with several security indicators including overvoltage risk, undervoltage risk, line-overload risk and load-loss risk is established using probabilistic load flow and dynamical sensitivity weight analysis method. Thirdly, conditional value at risk model is presented for time-varying economic risk considering line-loss risk and operational profit or loss risk of distributed generations. Finally, a risk early warning standard is proposed to realise the visualisation of risk warning by defining the risk level and risk area. Simulations of different scenarios are conducted on the modified IEEE 34-bus radial test system and the results reveal that the proposed strategy is effective and practical.
