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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts T3-F.3 Huerta, MF; National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health; mike.huerta@nih.gov The NIH BD2K initiative: Enabling biomedical research & raising the prominence of data Biomedical research generates vast amounts of complex and diverse data, increasingly in digital form. Despite some important exceptions, many of these data never leave the labs in which they are generated. Rather, the major public products of this research are concepts described in scientific publications, not the data upon which those concepts are based. The NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative will advance the science and technology of data and big data, enabling the research community to harness the transformative power of large scale computation to advance understanding of health and illness. Significantly, BD2K will also raise the prominence of data in biomedicine. It will establish an ecosystem for research data that will bring data into the routine processes of science and scholarship by making it more available, discoverable, usable, and citable, and by linking data to the scientific literature. This presentation will provide an overview and status report of the initiative, including: findings from a series of recently held workshops, synopses of funding opportunities and a vision of the manner in which BD2K will affect the scientific landscape in biomedicine. W2-D.3 Humblet, MF; Vandeputte, S; Albert, A; Gosset, C; Kirschvink, N; Haubruge, E; Fecher-Bourgeois, F; Pastoret, PP; Saegerman, C*; University of Liege; claude.saegerman@ulg.ac.be A multidisciplinary and evidence-based methodology applied to prioritize diseases of food-producing animals and zoonoses Objectives: optimize financial and human resources for the surveillance, prevention, control and elimination of infectious diseases and to target the surveillance for an early detection of any emerging disease. Material and methods: The method presented here is based on multi-criteria analysis consisting in listing the criteria to assess pathogens, evaluating the pathogens on these criteria (scores), determining the relative importance of each criterion (weight), aggregating scores and weights of criteria into one overall weighted score per pathogen. This method is based on a multi-criteria decision making including multidisciplinary international experts’ opinion (N=40) for the weighting process and evidence-based data for information corresponding to each criterion/disease (>1,800 references). Hundred diseases were included in the process (OIE listed diseases and emerging diseases in Europe) and five categories of criteria (N=57) were considered. An overall weighted score was calculated for each disease using Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the uncertainty and the consecutive ranking was established. A classification and regression tree analysis allowed the classification of diseases with the aim to obtain subgroups with minimal within-variance (grouping diseases with similar importance). Results: A final ranking of diseases was presented according to their overall weighted scores and using a probabilistic approach. Few differences were observed between deterministic (mean of each weight) and probabilistic approaches (distribution function of weights) (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.999; p-value < 0.0001). This is probably linked to few subjective interpretation problems or to the dilution of individual discordances among the high number of experts. CART analysis permits to differentiate 4 groups of diseases in function of their relative importance. Conclusions: The present methodology is a generic and predictive tool applicable to different contexts. W4-B.2 Irons, RD*; Kerzic, PJ; Fudan University Shanghai, China; Cinpathogen, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; richard.irons@cinpathogen.com Predicting the risk of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) using peripheral blood cells or cells in culture has questionable biological relevance The hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) compartment gives rise to all blood and lymphoid cells and is the origin for acute myeloid leukemia- initiating cells (AML-IC). Recent advances in stem cell biology reveal that the characteristics traditionally ascribed to HSC, i.e. the capacity for self-renewal, maintenance of hematopoiesis, as well as the quiescence required for longevity, are the result of complex cell interactions in the bone marrow microenvironmental niche. HSC in bone marrow are typically found at frequencies between 10-6 - 10-7 and cannot form colonies in semisolid media. In isolation, HSC possess the intrinsic characteristics of primitive cells; rapidly proliferate with accumulating cytogenetic damage, and they assume the phenotype of AML-IC. Studies based on actual disease outcomes reveal that AML following exposure to benzene, a prototype chemical leukemogen, actually possess cytogenetic features consistent with de novo- AML and not those typical of therapy-related disease, nor those found in circulating lymphocytes of exposed subjects or induced in bone marrow cells in vitro. Consequently, measuring cytogenetic abnormalities in surrogate cells or even CD34+ cells in culture is not useful for predicting the risk of AML developing in vivo. Presently, the definitive basis for predicting the risk of AML in humans is evidence-based medicine. P.28 Ishimaru, T*; Yamaguchi, H; Tokai, A; Nakakubo, T; Osaka University; ishimaru@em.see.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp Development of practical quantifying method applicable for risk assessment of metabolic inhibition during co-exposure in workplaces by applying a PBPK model in humans At present, chemical substances in workplaces were managed based on administrative control level for single substance. When a number of chemical substances are used in a workplace, they are managed on the assumption that risk increase additively. The Hazard Index is calculated as the sum of the ratio a chemical’s exposure level to administrative control level, such that values larger than 1 are of concern. However the management based on this assumption cannot appropriately control compounds concerned the effect of metabolic inhibition. Based on the above considerations, we aim to develop the method to quantify the effect of metabolic inhibition in order to support risk management in occupational workplaces. In particular, we construct the method to derive dose-response curve by applying PBPK model for the metabolic inhibition and assess the effect caused by co-exposure with the case of toluene and n-hexane. Using the method to integrate the PBPK model applicable for co-exposure to toluene and n-hexane into the hierarchical model to evaluate the dose-response relations by dividing into pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD), we have derived the dose-response curve including metabolic inhibition. As a result, by quantifying the variation of risk levels such as BMD10 from the dose-response curve excluding metabolic inhibition and the curve including metabolic inhibition, the effect of the metabolic inhibition was quantified for every administered concentration of competing chemical substances. We evaluated the threshold of co-exposure interaction. Moreover, this method could be applied to another type of combination of chemicals which causes the mutual metabolic inhibition if their metabolic inhibition mechanism is clear. Therefore, for the further development of this method, we deem it necessary to classify compounds which may cause the mutual metabolic inhibition in workplaces, and to clarify the competition mechanism of metabolic enzyme. December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD
Page 1 and 2:
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts W
Page 3 and 4:
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts P
Page 5 and 6:
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts T
Page 7 and 8: SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts M
Page 9 and 10: SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts T
Page 11 and 12: SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts W
Page 17 and 18: SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts P
Page 57: SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts T
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts M
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts M
Page 139 and 140:
show all

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?