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

SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts
M2-H.1 Middleton, JK*; Stoeckel, DM; Nilsen, M; Winkel, D;
Anderson, D; Pals, T; 1, 2, 3, 4 - BATTELLE, 5, 6, -
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY DIRECTORATE; middletonj@battelle.org
: A second look at bioterrorism scenarios for the
Bioterrorism Risk Assessment (BTRA)
The Department of Homeland Security’s Bioterrorism Risk
Assessment (BTRA) includes a large number of scenarios to
provide a comprehensive assessment of risk to the nation.
Advancements in technology and emergence or re-emergence
of pathogenic organisms require that the scenarios considered
within the assessment be revisited on a regular basis. To
reduce the burden associated with full implementation into the
BTRA and to ensure that including a pathogen, technology, or
target into the BTRA is worth the investment, DHS has tested
applicability of an analytic approach used in the historic
biological research program and has developed a method for
assessing the potential consequences of a new scenario as a
preliminary assessment. The method minimizes the input data
needed for the scenario and simplifies the target considerations
to a few specific targets that provide a reasonable assessment
of potential consequences. This new methodology will be
presented along with an overview of how the method will help
to guide inclusion of scenarios within the BTRA.
T1-A.1 Miles, S*; Dalrymple, K. E.; Madsen, P; Krajewski, J;
University of Iowa; stephanie-miles@uiowa.edu
Finding Words That Work: Assessing Media Coverage of
Water Issues Across Iowa
The past decade has seen a rise in concern for water resource
management and policies under the increasing strain from
domestic, agricultural, industrial and recreational use of our
nation’s aquatic resources. Iowa, like many other states, is
investing in research and technology to improve sustainability
practices in hopes that proper management today will provide
abundance in the future. Studies suggest that policy initiatives
created by university researchers and government officials find
more success through engagement with the public to promote
understanding of water sustainability concerns and
participation in community efforts (Gleick, 2003). Crucial
antecedents to awareness for any environmental concern are
knowledge and understanding of the processes, terminology,
and science surrounding the issue. Previous research suggests
that the public obtains basic understandings of science and
technology through exposure to mass media messages
(Friedman, Dunwoody, & Rogers, 1986). This study builds upon
this research by investigating how Iowa newspapers cover
water-related topics with a goal of informing future research
concerning public knowledge of water sustainability issues and
policies. We examine these research questions using a content
analysis of daily Iowa newspapers with a circulation between
8,470 and 120,654 covering the region of interest. Results shed
light upon the ways that journalists address water issues in
relation to topics covered, such as drought, toxicity problems,
utility sources, recreational uses, and ecological perspectives.
These findings not only contribute to our understanding of
water sustainability coverage, but also provide insight as to
what water related media content Iowa residents are exposed
to in their daily lives. Implications of this research regarding
the potential effects that such media exposure may have on
knowledge of water issues, public opinion towards water use
and regulation, and future support of water policies are
discussed.
T3-I.2 Miller, MK*; Baker, JW; Stanford University;
mahalia@stanford.edu
Simulation approaches for assessing the impacts on
equity in a region due to earthquakes
Earthquakes impact different regions and different
demographic groups differently, as evidenced, for example, in
the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake by the relatively slow
recovery of low-income communities in Watsonville, CA
compared to that of the wealthier surrounding communities. Up
to now, seismic risk analysis has focused on individual locations
or on aggregate measures of network performance. In this
article we present a method for assessing the impacts on equity
in terms of changes in accessibility for different geographic and
demographic groups in a region. First, we explain how to
employ an activity-based traffic model to answer a new
question, namely how transportation patterns will shift after
parts of the highway and transit networks are damaged. This
provides us a tool for assessing changes in accessibility for
each different community. The tool also allows policy makers to
quantify the costs and benefits of different mitigation
strategies. Second, we illustrate the framework with a case
study of the San Francisco Bay Area using a state-of-the-art
stochastic catalog of earthquake events. Our findings suggest
that local infrastructure, such as the redundancy of the
highway links, as well as the geographical proximity to active
faults are key predictors of the communities most likely to
experience high losses of accessibility but we identify critical
outliers at particularly high risk, such as San Rafael, CA.
Finally, by analyzing the demographics in travel demand we
compare the expected equity consequences from the full
stochastic catalog of earthquake events both in the current
state of the infrastructure and with two simulated mitigation
strategies, one focusing on mitigating overall average regional
risk and one focusing on reducing extreme demographic group
risks. Thus, this framework will assist private and public policy
makers to improve decisions about risk mitigation by
incorporating an understanding of the impacts on equity.
P.66 Mishra, A*; Lambertini, E; Pradhan, AK; University of
Maryland College Park, MD; amishra1@umd.edu
Foodborne pathogens in leafy greens: Data, predictive
models, and quantitative risk assessments
In the last few years, technological innovations in production,
harvesting, processing, and packaging of fresh produce and
their consumption have increased tremendously in the U.S.
Consumers are eating more fresh produce, purchasing a
broader variety and demanding more convenience products
such as ready-to-eat salads. Fresh produce is generally
consumed raw, making it a high-risk food in terms of pathogen
contamination. A recent study by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention indicated that in between 1998 and
2008, leafy greens outbreaks accounted for 22.3% of foodborne
outbreaks. Contamination with pathogens of fresh produce
including leafy greens has been a major concern to various
stakeholders such as food industry, regulatory agencies, and
consumers. In this study, we performed a structured review of
literature to gain more insight into the available data and
information related to contamination sources, predictive
microbial models, and quantitative risk assessment models for
different pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes,
Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157:H7 in leafy greens in the
farm-to-table continuum. It was observed that microbial
contamination mostly originated from the pre-harvest
environment. Contamination can effectively be controlled by
storing the leafy greens at appropriate temperature and time,
and by the application of intervention steps such as washing
and irradiation. Several research studies on predictive
modeling and quantitative microbial risk assessments of
pathogens in fresh produce, which are focused on one or more
steps such as irrigation, harvesting, processing, transportation,
storage, and washing, have been reported in the last few years.
We divided those into three categories: pre-harvest models,
storage models, and models related to intervention steps,
primarily washing. Overall, our study provides valuable
information to inform future quantitative microbial risk
assessment studies related to leafy greens.
December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD