The Use of Bounding Analysis in Risk Analysis

该项目将开始发展和示范一种新方法，在传统的逐个代理的“前后”风险分析所产生的结果具有极其广泛的不确定性界限的情况下，对可归因于一系列环境因素的风险产生定量界限。该方法将首先以一种便于比较的形式总结有关终点的现有毒理学和流行病学证据。将制定一个有限总和的专家启发程序，利用这些数据和专家判断，以概率的方式将健康终点的已知和疑似原因归因于观察到的病例。这项工作的结果应该是形成一套新的方法，可供风险分析界与更传统的风险分析方法结合使用，以确定某些类型的环境风险可能对健康产生的影响程度。

The project will begin the development and demonstration of a new method to produce quantitative bounds on the risk that can be attributed to a set of environmental agents in circumstances in which conventional agent-by-agent "front-to-back" risk analysis produces results with extremely wide uncertainty bounds. The method will begin by summarizing available toxicological and epidemiological evidence on the end-point(s) in a form that facilitates easy comparisons. A constrained sum expert elicitation procedure will be developed which uses these data, together with expert judgment, to probabilistically attribute known and suspected causes of the health end-point to the observed cases. The result of this work should be a new set of methods which can be used by the risk analysis community in conjunction with more traditional risk analytic methods to bound the magnitude of possible health impacts from some types of environmental risks.