Seafood Choices Yaktine, Ann L; Nesheim, Malden C
02/2007
eBook
Open access
The fragmented information that consumers receive about the nutritional value and health risks associated with fish and shellfish can result in confusion or misperceptions about these food sources. ...Consumers are therefore confronted with a dilemma: they are told that seafood is good for them and should be consumed in large amounts, while at the same time the federal government and most states have issued advisories urging caution in the consumption of certain species or seafood from specific waters.
Seafood Choices carefully explores the decision-making process for selecting seafood by assessing the evidence on availability of specific nutrients (compared to other food sources) to obtain the greatest nutritional benefits. The book prioritizes the potential for adverse health effects from both naturally occurring and introduced toxicants in seafood; assesses evidence on the availability of specific nutrients in seafood compared to other food sources; determines the impact of modifying food choices to reduce intake of toxicants on nutrient intake and nutritional status within the U.S. population; develops a decision path for U.S. consumers to weigh their seafood choices to obtain nutritional benefits balanced against exposure risks; and identifies data gaps and recommendations for future research.
The information provided in this book will benefit food technologists, food manufacturers, nutritionists, and those involved in health professions making nutritional recommendations.
The measles outbreak at Disneyland in December 2014 spread to a half-dozen U.S. states and sickened 147 people. It is just one recent incident that the medical community blames on the nation's ...falling vaccination rates. Still, many parents continue to claim that the risks that vaccines pose to their children are far greater than their benefits. Given the research and the unanimity of opinion within the medical community, many ask how such parents-who are most likely to be white, college educated, and with a family income over $75,000-could hold such beliefs.
For over a decade, Jennifer Reich has been studying the phenomenon of vaccine refusal from the perspectives of parents who distrust vaccines and the corporations that make them, as well as the health care providers and policy makers who see them as essential to ensuring community health. Reich reveals how parents who opt out of vaccinations see their decision: what they fear, what they hope to control, and what they believe is in their child's best interest. Based on interviews with parents who fully reject vaccines as well as those who believe in "slow vax," or altering the number of and time between vaccinations, the author provides a fascinating account of these parents' points of view.
Placing these stories in dialogue with those of pediatricians who see the devastation that can be caused by vaccine-preventable diseases and the policy makers who aim to create healthy communities,Calling the Shotsoffers a unique opportunity to understand the points of disagreement on what is best for children, communities, and public health, and the ways in which we can bridge these differences.
This report uses a comprehensive framework for studying health risks that was developed for the World Health Report 2002, which presented estimates for the year 2000. The report provides an update ...for the year 2004 for 24 global risk factors. It uses updated information from WHO programs and scientific studies for both exposure data and the causal associations of risk exposure to disease and injury outcomes. The burden of disease attributable to risk factors is measured in terms of lost years of healthy life using the metric of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY). The DALY combines years of life lost due to premature death with years of healthy life lost due to illness and disability. Health risks are in transition: populations are ageing owing to successes against infectious diseases; at the same time, patterns of physical activity and food, alcohol and tobacco consumption are changing. Low- and middle-income countries now face a double burden of increasing chronic, noncommunicable conditions, as well as the communicable diseases that traditionally affect the poor.
Cultural theory (CT) developed from grid/group analysis, which posits that different patterns of social relations—hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist—produce compatible cultural ...biases influencing assessment of which hazards pose high or low risk and how to manage them. Introduced to risk analysis (RA) in 1982 by Douglas and Wildavsky's Risk and Culture, this institutional approach to social construction of risk surprised a field hitherto focused on psychological influences on risk perceptions and behavior. We explain what CT is and how it developed; describe and evaluate its contributions to the study of risk perception and management, and its prescriptions for risk assessment and management; and identify opportunities and resources to develop its contributions to RA. We suggest how the diverse, fruitful, but scattered efforts to develop CT both inside and outside the formal discipline of RA (as exemplified by the Society for Risk Analysis) might be leveraged for greater theoretical, methodological, and applied progress in the field.
Are Risk Preferences Stable? Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2018, Volume:
32, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
It is ultimately an empirical question whether risk preferences are stable over time. The evidence comes from diverse strands of literature, covering the stability of risk preferences in panel data ...over shorter periods of time, life-cycle dynamics in risk preferences, the possibly long-lasting effects of exogenous shocks on risk preferences as well as temporary variations in risk preferences. Individual risk preferences appear to be persistent and moderately stable over time, but their degree of stability is too low to be reconciled with the assumption of perfect stability in neoclassical economic theory. We offer an alternative conceptual framework for preference stability that builds on research regarding the stability of personality traits in psychology. The definition of stability used in psychology implies high levels of rank-order stability across individuals and not that the individual will maintain the same level of a trait over time. Preference parameters are considered as distributions with a mean that is significantly but less than perfectly stable, plus some systematic variance. This framework accommodates evidence on systematic changes in risk preferences over the life cycle, due to exogenous shocks such as economic crises or natural catastrophes, and due to temporary changes in self-control resources, emotions, or stress. We note that research on the stability of (risk) preferences is conceptually at the heart of microeconomics and systematic changes in risk preferences have vital real-world consequences.
While flooding is the costliest natural disaster risk, public‐sector investments provide incomplete protection. Moreover, individuals are in general reluctant to voluntarily invest in measures which ...limit damage costs from natural disasters. The moral hazard hypothesis argues that insured individuals take fewer other preparedness measures based on their assumption that their losses will be covered anyway. Conversely, the advantageous selection hypothesis argues that individuals view insurance and other risk reduction measures as complements. This study offers a comprehensive assessment of factors related to the separate uptake of natural disaster insurance and the flood‐proofing of homes as well as why people may take both of these measures together. We use data from a survey conducted in Paris, France, in 2018, after several flood events, for a representative sample of 2976 residents facing different levels of flood risk. We perform both main effects regressions and interaction analyses to reveal that home adaptation to flooding is positively associated with comprehensive insurance coverage, which includes financial protection against natural disasters. Furthermore, actual and perceived risks, as well as awareness of official information on flood risk, are found to explain some of the relationship between home adaptation and comprehensive insurance purchase. We suggest several recommendations to policymakers based on these insights which aim to address insurance coverage gaps and the failure to take disaster risk reduction measures. In particular, groups in socially vulnerable situations may benefit from subsidized insurance, low interest loans, and decision aids to implement costly adaptation measures.
Freaks of Fortune Levy, Jonathan
2012, 2014., 2012-10-29, 20120101
eBook
Until the nineteenth century, "risk" was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells how the modern concept of risk emerged in the ...United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.
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The sociology of hazardous waste, risk, and disastersis a relatively new discipline with anincreasing volume of empirical research by scholars. Francis O. Adeola focuses this bookon hazardous ...and toxic wastes releases, industrial toxic disasters, contamination of communities and the environment, and the subsequent adverse health effects among exposed populations.He explains the emerging sociological study of risk, natural, and technological disasters, and he reviews the accumulated body of knowledge in the field up-to-date. This groundbreaking work integrates sociological perspectives with perspectives from other disciplines in the discussion of the problems posed by technological hazards both in advanced industrialized societies and in underdeveloped world.
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The sociology of hazardous waste, risk, and disasters is a relatively new discipline with an increasing volume of empirical research by scholars. Francis O. Adeola focuses this book on hazardous and toxic wastes releases, industrial toxic disasters, contamination of communities and the environment, and the subsequent adverse health effects among exposed populations. He explains the emerging sociological study of risk, natural, and technological disasters, and he reviews the accumulated body of knowledge in the field up-to-date. This groundbreaking work integrates sociological perspectives with perspectives from other disciplines in the discussion of the problems posed by technological hazards both in advanced industrialized societies and in underdeveloped world.
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PART I: HAZARDOUS WASTES, DISASTERS AND HEALTH RISKS Sociology of Hazardous Wastes, Disasters, and Risk Hazardous and Toxic Wastes as Social Problems Taxonomy of Hazardous Wastes PART II: ELECTRONIC WASTES, PERSISTENT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS, AND HEALTH EFFECTS Electronic Waste: The Dark Side of High-Tech Revolution Environmental Health Risks of Persistent Organic Compounds PART III: CONTAMINATED COMMUNITIES AND REGULATORY RESPONSES Communities Contaminated by Toxic Wastes and Industrial Disasters: Selected Cases The Regulatory Frameworks PART IV: CONCLUSION Critical Environmental Justice Movement
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Francis Adeola is a professor of Sociology at University of New Orleans.
Risk aversion—but also the higher-order risk preferences of prudence and temperance—are fundamental concepts in the study of economic decision making. We propose a method to jointly measure the ...intensity of risk aversion, prudence, and temperance. Our theoretical approach is to define risk compensations of different orders, and in an experiment we elicit these compensations with a price list technique. We find evidence for risk aversion, prudence, and temperance. These traits correlate within subjects. The compensations elicited for prudence are significantly larger than those for risk aversion and temperance. In contrast to commonly used utility functions, prospect theory can predict this behavioral pattern. In our experiment, risk-averse, risk-loving, and risk-neutral subjects are prudent. This supports a recent theoretical observation that prudence may be a more universal trait than previously realized.
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