It ought to be the best of times for someone like me. I’m a professional risk assessor--the director of health standards at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)--and risk assessors are much in demand these days. One reason is that the nature of the health and environmental hazards we face has changed. When rivers were bursting into flame, as Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River did in 1969, or when smog was so bad it made your eyes tear, we didn’t need elaborate risk assessments to tell us something had to be done. The newer generation of environmental threats are different: they’re often no less serious, but they’re harder to measure and harder to eliminate. When toxic chemicals leak onto an open field for decades, and a neighborhood grows up around that field, and some of the chemicals seem to be reaching groundwater used for drinking, should the field be cleaned up, and if so, to what extent? When the air in a factory contains potential carcinogens, should the owner be forced to retool, possibly at great expense? Quantitative risk assessment, or QRA, tries to give policymakers the information they need to answer such questions in a rational way. It tries to determine how many people are likely to get sick or die as a result of a particular hazard, and how much it would cost to save at least some of them.
QRA is a young discipline. I’ve been involved with it for 15 years, which is practically since its beginning. In the early years, we risk assessors took a lot of criticism from the left side of the political spectrum. For a long time the notion that the value of saving human lives could be quantified and compared with the costs of regulations was anathema to many public-interest advocates. In recent years that has changed; environmental groups have begun to realize that setting such values is not immoral (although setting them too low might be).
But the most striking recent development has been the embrace-- actually more like a bear hug--that qra has received from the right. Regulatory reform was one of the key provisions of the Republican Contract With America, and legislation passed by the House of Representatives last year and now pending in the Senate would require risk assessments to be carried out on an unprecedented scale. In effect, every new health and environmental regulation would have to be based on a qra certifying that the benefits of the regulation--the risks it reduced-- justified its costs. I’m certainly in favor of creating more demand for risk assessors, assuming Congress also provides the resources to fund their work.
