Final Program - Society for Risk Analysis

oth recent advances, and ongoing challenges in risk practice. Specifically, thissymposium will focus on advances and remaining challenges in two importantareas: 1) building a culture of risk management in a young and maturing securityorganization, and 2) tackling some of the most difficult and importantmethodological challenges relevant to Homeland Security risk analysis. In thefirst area, organizational processes are just as important as sound analysis interms of achieving risk-informed decisions. Different from approaches forimproving methodological aspects of risk analysis, the difficulties in establishinglasting processes in a security organization are about changing the decisionmaking culture, and can take a significant amount of time. This symposiumwill feature a presentation on progress in establishing risk-informed processesand culture within DHS. In the second area, the Department faces a numberof methodological challenges including difficulties in estimating event likelihoodsfor “intelligent adversary” driven events such as terrorism, difficultiesin quantitatively capturing the effect of deterrence, and the need for improvedexpert elicitation methods for security risk analyses. This symposium will discussmethodological improvements and remaining challenges in these andother areas, and in addition, will allow the broader risk community at SRA tooffer feedback and suggestions to DHS for further improvement.M2-I Symposium: Interagency Food Safety AnalyticsTo meet shared analytical needs related to food safety, CDC, FSIS andFDA have joined together to form the Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration(IFSAC). As its first priority, the IFSAC is focusing on improvingestimates of foodborne disease attribution fractions. Attribution fractionsindicate the percent of total foodborne illnesses due to a specific pathogenthat is associated with contaminated food from a particular commodity; forexample, the proportion of foodborne Salmonella illnesses that are due tocontaminated eggs. Attribution fractions allow the regulatory agencies to estimatethe number of illnesses linked to each food commodity, which helpswith prioritization, economic analyses, and evaluation of the effectiveness ofinterventions. Collecting and analyzing the epidemiological data used to estimatethe total number of foodborne illnesses is the responsibility of CDC.There are many different methodologies for estimating attribution fractions,and all have their strengths and weaknesses. The goal of IFSAC is to align thethree agencies so they are working collaboratively to improve the estimationof these attribution fractions - to increase consistency in interpretation andapplication of attribution fractions, and to clarify the uncertainty associatedwith these estimates. This symposium will present four sessions describing theframework and current work of IFSAC. First, an overview will be provided,describing the IFSAC Strategic Plan and the process that was undertaken todevelop and get stakeholder input on the plan. Next, the approach to meet theshort term needs for attribution will be discussed. Also, projects developedto expand or validate existing methodologies and estimates will be presented.The final presentation will discuss approaches that estimate attribution fractionsas functions of consumption.M3-C Symposium: Dose Response for BiothreatsDRSG Symposium: The paucity of our knowledge of mechanisms controllinghuman resistance and susceptibility to doses of pathogens includingbiothreat agents currently limits options for risk managers to make sciencebaseddecisions about levels of concern for public health outcomes. US ArmyPublic Health Command (USAPHC) recognizes a critical procedural gap: limitedability to integrate mechanistic knowledge of dose-response relationshipsinto the military risk assessment matrix used to categorize population-levelhealth and operational risks. USAPHC is utilizing available data from publisheddose-response studies to derive Biological Military Exposure Guidelines(BMEGs) for pathogens in air or water. This symposium focuses on the needfor robust dose-response assessment (DRA) for pneumonic tularemia in primates,with extensive but fragmentary evidence of dose-dependency not onlyfor likelihood of disease, but also for disease severity, duration, and incubationperiod. Extrapolations are needed between hosts, strains, and endpointsfor robust, biologically-based modeling to support BMEGs derivation. Tularemiadetection in urban aerosols with no corresponding human illness isinconsistent with the widely held assumption that as few as 10 bacterial cellsare sufficient to cause human tularemia. The speakers address this and otherinconsistencies from diverse perspectives including medical microbiology, microbialrisk assessment, statistics and engineering, and aerosol research. Theapproaches presented for tularemia are relevant to multiple agencies seeking totransition into more biologically-based processes and procedures that integrateand expand knowledge of dose dependencies essential for establishing validexposure guidelines for pathogens in air, food, and water.41