Re: Acceptable Risk vs. Resources - WNV vs. other Diseases

Linn Haramas is certainly correct in pointing out the difficulties in
deciding what is "acceptable risk".
There is a substantial literature on risk perceptions as well as books
on acceptable risk. The problems include: 1) what is acceptable to the
risk assessor or risk manager, may not be acceptable to the target
population or the individual at risk.

Risk assessment is based on the concept that the risk is spread
uniformly over the denominator population, but of course it never is.
Most individuals are either risk averse (and are likely to overestimate
their individual risk) or not (and my underestimate their individual
risk, even to the point of denial----teenagers are notorious for this).

The challenge is that risk communication is heard by individuals even
though the underlying risk assessment is based on populations.

Risk perceptions are shaped in many ways (search on Paul Slovic on
medline for some of the historic papers on this topic).

M. Gochfeld
Received on Mon Jan 14 17:15:20 2002