Abstracts (PDF file, 1.8MB) - Society for Risk Analysis

SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts
M2-C.4 Hoss, F*; Vaishnav, P; Carnegie Mellon University;
fhoss@andrew.cmu.edu
What guides spending on risk mitigation: Perceptions or
statistics?
People perceive risks on numerous dimensions. They care about
different risks more or less than the expected losses from those
risks would justify. This puts policymakers in a quandary.
Should they prioritize their risk mitigation efforts and resources
based on people’s perceptions, or based on some ‘objective’
assessment? Policymakers do not spend equally on mitigating
different risks. For example, a wide range of values of
statistical life that can be inferred from a range of proposed
and actual policy interventions that would reduce the risk of
premature mortality. Our research will compare what different
countries – in the first instance, the US and the countries of the
EU – spend on mitigating different risks. Based on published
data, we will work out what the expected value of losses
associated with these risks are in each of the countries. Based
on survey data, we will find out how residents of these
countries perceive each of these risks: for example, to what
extent do they think the risk is voluntary. We will then work out
whether spending priorities are more closely correlated with
expected value of losses or perceived risks in one country or
another, and try to explain why these correlations are different.
For example, the US and Europe have different approaches to
risk mitigation is in the detection and treatment of cancer.
Europeans are more likely to die of certain cancers than
Americans. A possible explanation is that there is a greater
emphasis on regular scans in the US. Surveys suggest that
Europeans dread cancer, and place a greater value on
preventing the loss of life due to cancer than due to other
causes. Why, then, do Europeans place less emphasis on
scanning for cancer? Is this a historical artefact? Is this a
choice policymakers have made despite public opinion? Do
Europeans dread cancer less than Americans do? Do
policymakers with different professional backgrounds reach
different decisions? Our research will answer such questions.
T1-C.3 Hoss, F; CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY,
Pittsburgh; fhoss@andrew.cmu.edu
The clients of the National Weather Service: Does the
current use of river forecasts fully exploit their potential
to decrease flood risk?
For thousands of river gages, the National Weather Service
daily publishes the expected river-stage for the next few days.
Good river forecasts have skill for up to two days ahead,
meaning that they perform better than assuming that water
level will not change. For more lead time, especially when
extreme events are concerned, the forecast error grows rapidly.
It is not uncommon that forecasts for river-stages in the 90th
percentile of observed river-stages have average errors of
several feet. The river forecast centers of the National Weather
Service do not yet publish the uncertainty or expected error
associated with these short-term forecasts. It follows that
successful use of river forecasts is heavily dependent on the
understanding of the uncertainty of forecasts. For example,
ignorance of the average errors of forecasts for the Red River
led to insufficient preparation of Grand Forks, ND and its
subsequent flooding in 1997. This research focuses on the users
of river forecasts in emergency management. Central questions
are if the emergency managers have the knowledge to correctly
use the forecasts and what the benefits of river forecasts as
they are used today are. Do river forecasts as they are
published today reduce the flood risk, e.g. the likelihood to
suffer damage from flooding? To investigate these questions, 17
emergency managers of mostly small and medium-sized
communities along rivers in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma have
been interviewed. The analysis is structured as follows. First,
the emergency forecasters themselves are described. Which
education and experience do they have? How much do they
know about the forecasting process and the resulting
uncertainty? Second, the process of preparing for an
approaching flood and the role of river forecasts therein is
analyzed. Third, the research zooms in on the use of the
forecast. Which forecasts are being used and through what
channels are they accessed? The research is rounded off with a
discussion on how river forecast could reduce flood risk if they
were used more effectively.
T4-D.5 Hristozov, DH*; Wohlleben, W; Steinfeldt, M; Nowack,
B; Scott-Fordsmand, J; Jensen, KA; Stone, V; Costa, A; Linkov, I;
Marcomini, A; University Ca' Foscari Venice;
danail.hristozov@unive.it
Sustainable nanotechnologies (SUN)
Our understanding of the environmental and health risks
associated with nanotechnology is still limited and may result in
stagnation of growth and innovation. There have been other
technologies that revealed unexpected ecological and health
effects only several years after their broader market
introduction. In the worst cases this caused tremendous costs
for society and the enterprises in the form of lock-in effects,
over-balancing regulations and demolished consumer
confidence. The new European Seventh Framework Programme
SUN (Sustainable Nanotechnologies) project, worth 14 million
euro, is based on the hypothesis that the current knowledge on
environmental and health risks of nanomaterials, whilst limited,
can nevertheless guide nanomanufacturing to avoid future
liabilities. SUN goal is to develop and apply an integrated
approach that addresses the complete lifecycle of production,
use and disposal of nanomaterials to ensure holistic safety
evaluation. The project will incorporate scientific findings from
over 30 European projects, national and international research
programmes and transatlantic co-operation to develop methods
and tools to predict nanomaterials exposure and effects on
humans and ecosystems, implementable processes and
innovative technological solutions to reduce their risks, and
guidance on best practices for securing both
nano-manufacturing processes and nanomaterials ultimate fate,
including development of approaches for safe disposal and
recycling. The results will be integrated into tools and
guidelines for sustainable manufacturing, easily accessible by
industries, regulators and other stakeholders.The industrial
partners in the SUN consortium will evaluate and
“reality-check” these tools in case studies in terms of
cost/benefit and insurance risk. The project involves major
stakeholders such as OECD, ECHA, US EPA in implementing
the SUN results into practice and regulation.
P.62 Huang, Y*; Anderson, S; Yang, H; The US Food and Drug
Administration; Yin.Huang@fda.hhs.gov
Modeling the relationship between post-vaccination
hemagglutination inhibition (HI) titer and protection
against influenza
The objective of this research is to evaluate the relationship
between post-vaccination HI titer in the host and the protection
against influenza using modeling approaches. The HI titer is
currently used as a surrogate endpoint for protection against
diseases in FDA’s regulatory review of influenza vaccine
products. We expect that the results of this research will
provide us an insight on whether HI titer is a good predictor of
protection against influenza; and if it is, what the level of HI
titer needed for a sufficient protection is. We first searched
available data from human challenge studies that reported
post-vaccination HI titer, challenge dose, and post-challenge
influenza infection. Five large-scale studies were identified.
Among them, four studies used single doses for challenge while
one reported multiple-dose challenge. We grouped the
volunteers based on their HI titer levels. We assumed the
relationship between challenge dose and infection rate
(response) could be described by exponential or beta-Poisson
dose-response models that have been widely used for a number
of infectious disease agents. We estimated the model
parameters for each HI titer group, and examined the
dependency between host susceptibility represented by model
parameters and post-vaccination HI titer. The dose-response
models were further modified by incorporating such
dependency and fit to the data set with graded challenge doses
using maximum likelihood estimation. An exponential
dependency between the model parameters and HI titer was
identified and the dose-response models incorporating this
dependency provided statistically acceptable fit to the data
while the original models failed to do so. The modified models
can be potentially used to identify the critical level of
post-vaccination HI titer required for sufficient protection
against influenza; and therefore, enhance our ability to evaluate
the efficacy and protection offered by future candidate
influenza vaccines.
December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD