Electronic Resource
350 Main Street , Malden , MA 02148 , USA , and 9600 Garsington Road , Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK .
:
Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
Risk analysis
25 (2005), S. 0
ISSN:
1539-6924
Source:
Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005
Topics:
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
Notes:
A simple procedure is proposed in order to quantify the tradeoff between a loss suffered from an illness due to exposure to a microbial pathogen and a loss due to a toxic effect, perhaps a different illness, induced by a disinfectant employed to reduce the microbial exposure. Estimates of these two types of risk as a function of disinfectant dose and their associated relative losses provide information for the estimation of the optimum dose of disinfectant that minimizes the total expected loss. The estimates of the optimum dose and expected relative total loss were similar regardless of whether the beta-Poisson, log-logistic, or extreme value function was used to model the risk of illness due to exposure to a microbial pathogen. This is because the optimum dose of the disinfectant and resultant expected minimum loss depend upon the estimated slope (first derivative) of the models at low levels of risk, which appear to be similar for these three models at low levels of risk. Similarly, the choice among these three models does not appear critical for estimating the slope at low levels of risk for the toxic effect induced by the use of a disinfectant. For the proposed procedure to estimate the optimum disinfectant dose, it is not necessary to have absolute values for the losses due to microbial-induced or disinfectant-induced illness, but only relative losses are required. All aspects of the problem are amenable to sensitivity analyses. The issue of risk/benefit tradeoffs, more appropriately called risk/risk tradeoffs, does not appear to be an insurmountable problem.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0272-4332.2005.00575.x
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