Colloquium

Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007

4:00 PM, BAC 102

Speaker: Adam Finkel, Department Of Environmental And Occupational Health, University of

Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, School of Public Health, Piscataway, NJ

Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, 2006-2007

Title: Recent Modernizing Quantitative Risk Analysis in Light of Human Inter-individual Variability

Abstract:

We often estimate and communicate risks to health by means of the "body count," as in "42,000 people

were killed in automobile crashes last year." Most of the federal and state regulations governing environmental

and occupational health risks seek to lower individual risks to an "acceptable" probability, such as one chance

in one million. In either case, scientists and regulators assume that one number can describe the situation for

every citizen. When we start from the "body count," we often implicitly or explicitly recast it as the individual

risk to the average person (in the example above, 42,000 deaths in a population of 300 million Americans yields

a risk of 1.4 per 10,000); when we start from a direct estimate of an individual risk, it sometimes is intended to

represent an atypical person at high risk, and sometimes the average person. None of these situations accounts

for the substantial variation in individual risk that real people face, as a consequence of the widely different

circumstances of exposure and the vast differences among us in our genetic predispositions, overall health status,

and other factors. This talk will explain how inadequate single estimates of risk can be, in two related arenas where

they are used: risks to health and safety in communities and workplaces, and results of medical screening tests

(or predictions of the risk of medical interventions). I will emphasize the recent explosion of knowledge about

the human genome, but will also provide examples of ignoring human differences that are much more obvious,

and will conclude with policy recommendations for improving risk assessment and risk management to enlighten

and benefit individuals as well as populations.