What Risk ? Science, Politics and Public Health.

Part of the effort by the European Science and Environment Forum to provide the media and the public with its perspective on current debates about environmental and personal risks, and to point out countervailing studies that are overlooked. The contributors are primarily concerned with highlighting the uncertainties inherent in scientific estimates of risk and with bringing the notion of dose as well as toxicity into questions of regulating substances. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Numerous examples of potential and real hazards are given. They all show that injury to personal health or the environment is a function not only of the toxicity (i.e. the lethality of a particular hazard) but of the level of exposure to the hazard concerned - in the words of the old maxim, the dose makes the poison. Existing regulation is criticized for being based on a flawed application of a poor epidemiological methodology, where toxicity is the basis of regulation and dose tends to be ignored. Furthermore, some authors conclude that risk is a subjective phenomenon that cannot be eliminated through regulation.