Food Safety: Is It Worth the Worry? : Part 3

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

(Page 3 of 3)

Medical reporter Victor Cohn echoes this belief: "The public is not entirely illogical," he says. "It is easier to cope with the known than the unknown and mysteriously threatening. We decide for ourselves whether to accept the risks of driving, drinking, smoking, or hang gliding. We may feel very different about a risk someone imposes on us — or a risk that could decimate a population if the worst happens."

Sandman examines the role of the media in contributing to the confusion concerning risk. An analysis of news stories on environmental risk submitted by newspaper editors in New Jersey showed that reporters focused on the politics of risk rather than the science of risk, politics being more newsworthy.

"Only a handful of the articles told readers what standard [if any] existed for the hazard in question, much less the status of research and technical debate surrounding the standard," Sandman points out. "Yet the public needs to understand abstractions like the uncertainty of risk assessments, the impossibility of zero risk, the debatable assumptions underlying dose-response curves and animal tests." Sandman advises journalists not to assert that the issue is "risky or not," but "how risky" it is.

Managing Risk

Health protection agencies have a responsibility to carry out risk assessments and use them judiciously to protect the public on the basis of the data available. Therefore, agencies sometimes must act before there is much more than even a "glimmer of certainty," as Scheuplein puts it, about the scientific accuracy of their conclusions. It is important to remember that the published risk estimates are inherently protective and not predictive.

Former FDA toxicologist W. Gary Flamm, Ph.D., in a chapter in Risk and Reason: Risk Assessment in Relation to Environmental Mutagens and Carcinogens, notes that there are few places outside of the United States where quantitative risk assessment is used for determining safe levels of carcinogenic substances. Flamm, who is now with Science Regulatory Services, International, in Washington, D.C., writes, "We could ask ourselves, is that because the United States is ahead of everyone else . . . or is it that the rest of the world knows something that we do not know and that ultimately we will come to realize that there are better ways of controlling risks to carcinogenic substances than the methods we are currently developing and using?"

The answer to this question may be a long time coming. In the meantime, Sandman proposes that "First, we need to teach people about hazard, to help them understand what the serious risks are. That's the long-term solution. Second, we have to do everything we can to make serious hazards outrageous; the furor over second-hand smoke, for example, has probably saved thousands of smokers' lives. And third, we have to stop goosing the outrage of insignificant hazards — environmentalists have to stop doing it on purpose, and government has to stop doing it by mistake."

Outrage Factors

Risk perception scholars have identified more than 20 "outrage factors" that, according to Rutgers University's Peter Sandman, risk managers cannot ignore in making policy decisions about managing environmental risks. Sandman defined the following nine in the November 1987 EPA Journal.

"Voluntariness: A voluntary risk is much more acceptable to people than a coerced risk, because it generates no outrage. Consider the difference between getting pushed down a mountain on slippery sticks and deciding to go skiing.

Control: Almost everybody feels safer driving than riding shotgun. When prevention and mitigation are in the individual's hands, the risk (though not the hazard) is much lower than when they are in the hands of a government agency.

Fairness: People who must endure greater risks than their neighbors, without access to greater benefits, are naturally outraged — especially if the rationale for so burdening them looks more like politics than science. Greater outrage, of course, means greater risk.

Process: Does the agency come across as trustworthy or dishonest, concerned or arrogant? Does it tell the community what's going on before the real decisions are made? Does it listen and respond to community concerns?

Morality: American society has decided over the last two decades that pollution isn't just harmful — it's evil. But talking about cost-risk tradeoffs sounds very callous when the risk is morally relevant. Imagine a police chief insisting that an occasional child molester is an acceptable risk.'

Familiarity: Exotic, high-tech facilities provoke more outrage than familiar risks (your home, your car, your jar of peanut butter).

Memorability: A memorable accident — Love Canal, Bhopal, Times Beach — makes the risk easier to imagine, and thus (as we have defined the term) more risky. A potent symbol — the 55-gallon drum — can do the same thing.

Dread: Some illnesses are more dreaded than others; compare AIDS and cancer with, say, emphysema. The long latency of most cancers and the undetectability of most carcinogens add to the dread.

Diffusion in time and space: Hazard A kills 50 anonymous people a year across the country. Hazard B has one chance in 10 of wiping out its neighborhood of 5,000 people sometime in the next decade. Risk assessment tells us the two have the same expected annual mortality: 50. Outrage assessment' tells us A is probably acceptable and B is certainly not."

About the Author

www.fda.gov
FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.