Review of Various Approaches for Assessing Public Health Risks in Regulatory Decision Making: Choosing the Right Approach for the Problem

 

 This article will show the differences in interpretation of risk assessment terminology. It gives several international and national organizations (Food and Agricultural Organization, World Health Organization, etc.) have addressed this issue, still confusion remains. The acceptance of risk assessment results by risk managers may reduce the usefulness for results of health practices and operations. The most appropriate assessment of risk management issues and corresponding risk assessment design needs formative stages of risk analysis processes. It is scientifically based, that risk assessments must be high quality, transparent, and reflective of current relevant scientific knowledge (22, 45, 56, and 64). The structure or design of risk assessment may differ considerably. One guiding principle for all assessments of public health risk is applicability to the “real world” and “fit for purpose” (23, 27, 35, and 45). The terms risk assessment or assessment of risk for policy developments recognized, views on conducting a risk assessment, risk managers, and the wider scientific and stakeholder communities (22). Risk analysis despite of the diversity contains four distinct elements. (1) Hazard identification (2) Hazard characterization (3) exposure assessment (4) risk characterization. According to SPS Agreement, the definition for assessment of risk does not require all four steps. The risk assessment report includes uncertainties and assumptions clearly describes the treatments of uncertainty and variability (27 and 45).
 A major goal in selecting the appropriate assessment approach is usually to align the approach needs to answer questions of risk management or inform policy decisions (45). In general, the outputs, qualitative, semi-qualitative, or quantitative risk estimates, shows specific risk management questions to address. According to the assessment of risk definition provided in the SPS Agreement (81), assessments do not always need to be quantitative. In the article, qualitative risk assessments may require fewer resources than quantitative risk assessments. Because qualitative assessments systematically synthesize all available data, these assessments are generally suited to identify data gaps, uncertainties, and relevant product pathways (28).
Work Cited
European Food Safety Authority. 2012. Scientific opinion on risk assessment terminology. EFSA J. 10: 2664.
National Research Council. 2009. Science and decisions: advancing risk assessment. National Academics Press, Washington, DC. Available at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12209. Accessed May 2014.