1. Improving the integration of epidemiological data into human health risk assessment: What risk assessors told us they want.
- Author
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Phillips CV, Burstyn I, Miller DJ, Hamade AK, Avanasi R, Boon D, Rege SV, and Déglin SE
- Abstract
One of the practical contributions of epidemiology studies is to inform risk assessment and management to protect public health. However, there is a perception among some that environmental and occupational epidemiology is falling short of satisfying the needs of risk assessors. The specific reasons for this are not clearly understood. To help identify the points of dissatisfaction and possible areas for mutual learning, we conducted a survey of risk assessors, seeking their opinions of epidemiology research. We present a few quantitative measures and a thematic analysis of responses to open-ended questions. Survey results suggest that some risk assessors (with some adamant exceptions) believe that epidemiology has great potential to contribute to risk assessment but can be deficient in many ways. For example, respondents identified the lack of full disclosure of methods, deficiencies in exposure assessment, the absence of comprehensive uncertainty analyses, and the failure to investigate or explore thresholds of effects as some of the common shortcomings. These could be straightforward to address. Respondents also brought up a wide collection of more complicated and subtle concerns that could lead to further improvement of useful results. We identify areas where mutually-educating interdisciplinary dialogue seems particularly promising. Epidemiology research is expensive, and risk management decisions even more so; therefore, it is desirable for the risk assessment and epidemiologic communities to work toward making epidemiologic research more useful for informing decisions., Competing Interests: The authors declare no financial conflicts of interest other than their employment relationships with companies that might have some unidentified goals that conflict with the goals of this work. IB and CVP disclose activism on behalf of better bias analyses and other improvements in the conduct of epidemiology, belief in existence of thresholds in biology, and sincere desire to make risk assessment more quantitative. While there is no apparent way that the financing of this project would create any conflict of interest regarding the project goals, design, or analysis, we also disclose that CVP was contracted for this project by HESI, IB subsumed it into his academic duties, SD worked on it as part of her employment at HESI, and the other authors volunteered their time., (© 2024 The Authors.) more...
- Published
- 2024
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