Should risk assessment be more transparent?

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Citation of this page: Jouko Tuomisto: Arsenic to Zoonoses. Opasnet 2024. [1]. Accessed 02 Nov 2024. This page has also been published elsewhere: 100 kysymystä ympäristöstä ja terveydestä: arsenikista öljyyn. Kustannus Oy Duodecim, Helsinki 2005. ISBN 951-656-221-3.
Upload data {{#opasnet_base_link:Op_en4281}}	Unlike most other pages in Opasnet, the nuggets have predetermined authors, and you cannot freely edit the contents. Note! If you want to protect the nugget you've created from unauthorized editing click here Chapters in the book Arsenic to Zoonoses: Perception of the risks around us Is it the final straw that breaks the camel’s back? Is expert jargon just a way to confuse the man in the street? What is the wisdom in “It’s the dose that determines that a thing is not a poison”? What is a “chemical” after all? Is it more dangerous for us than for our ancestors? Are the risks of the domestic and the workplace environments different? Is man defiled by what goes to his mouth? What is safe to drink? Does water chlorination cause cancer? Are blue-green algae a risk to your life or at least to your liver? Does aluminium cause dementia? Arsenic in the drinking water – reminiscent of the movie “Lavender and old lace”? Are we starting to glow from the uranium in our environment? Fluoride – friend or foe? Blind drunk – or dead drunk? What is really dangerous in our diet? Should we be concerned about the amounts of additives in our diet? May even our cooking habits hurt us? Why not re-freeze thawed out frozen food? The dirty dozen – not just an old movie? Where do the dioxins come from? Are the dioxins the most dangerous chemicals in our environment? Are the PCB compounds really super-poisons? What on earth is PBDE? What are the hormonal disrupters? Tin poisoning – wasn’t even grandma’s copper kitchenware tin-plated? Are heavy metals still a problem today? Is mercury a quicksilver bullet or a slow poison? If this kills insects, what effect is it having on me? The whole field was brown-coloured; should you even go near it let alone eat anything growing there? Should we only eat “organic” products? Isn’t it safe to eat everything that grows naturally? Is it safe to eat wherever it’s convenient? What if alcohol were treated as a chemical contaminant in food? A favourite of children - and some adults too Can even a child’s toy be dangerous? How does the environment affect the child in the womb? Is impregnated wood safe in my garden or children’s playground? Can you catch toxoplasmosis from cat litter? What are children’s waterproof clothes made of? Are people too clean for their own good? Are cosmetics chemicals? Should we have antibiotic chemicals present in everyday domestic items? How safe are detergents? Can noise cause true health problems? Is allergy more common today? A healthy suntan – or is it? Should solariums carry a health warning? The air that we breathe What’s wrong with the air in our cities? People don’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning any more – do they? Can the air go up in flames? Ozone – I thought it was the hole in the ozone layer that we need to worry about? Should we go back to heating our homes with wood-burning stoves? Climate change – will it affect our health? Is formaldehyde another type of formalin? Benzene – isn’t it only found in chemistry sets? Can environmental cigarette smoke cause lung cancer? Is there radiation in my home? Do we need to monitor the quality of the air in our homes? How can a building become sick? Do our recreational pastimes require special ventilation systems? Is asbestos still a problem today? What happens when a building suffers moisture damage? Legionnaires’ disease – why should I worry, I’m not in the Foreign Legion? How do air fresheners really work? How to protect our common environment? Why is it worth investing in environmental protection? Indigenous populations live in harmony with their environment, don’t they? Environmental equilibrium and chemicals – impossible or not? Down the drain – is it a case of out of sight, out of mind? Should we compost all our household waste? Does it make sense to burn our domestic waste in power stations? Is clean energy from biomass a myth? Which type of energy production is friendliest to human health? What was the impact of the Chernobyl disaster in Europe? Is it safe to live close to polluted land? Does environmental protection also mean improved health? If we care about our environment, should we all be vegetarians? Which environmental factors increase my blood pressure? Here a risk, there a risk, everywhere risks, risks! Are there problems in the present risk assessment practices? What is risk management? What are the most common misconceptions about risks held by the man in the street? Why are experts usually so sceptical? Why do different people rate different risks so differently? Can you lessen your own personal chemical burden? Why are people afraid of dental amalgam? What do we mean by the term “life cycle analysis”? The precautionary principle – better safe than sorry? Are GM foods Frankenfoods? Mutagenesis, carcinogenesis and other scary words – what do they really mean? Which type of radiation poses the greatest threat to our health? Are most cancers caused by exposures to chemicals? Is cancer more common today than it was in the past? We breathe oxygen; it can’t be dangerous, can it? Why are animal experiments still needed? Are electric lines and transformers dangerous? How dangerous is it to use a mobile phone? We are surrounded by risks but which of them should we take seriously? Are inhabitants of different countries exposed to different risks? Before we go on holiday which environmental health precautions should we take? Should risk assessment be more transparent? Is environmental science just another religion? What happens if the human race presses the self-destruct button?

The idea of conducting a risk assessment is a relatively recent development. The impetus stems from serious toxic incidents such as the use of ethylene glycol in the 1930s as a solvent for sulphanilamide, a poorly water-soluble antibacterial drug or the introduction of thalidomide in 1959. Ethylene glycol was responsible for many cases of kidney failure in patients, and this disaster was critical not only for the development of toxicology as a science but also for the establishment of government agencies to control the marketing of pharmaceuticals, e.g. the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The thalidomide catastrophe^[1] was the instigator of drug registration practices in Europe.

The Delaney amendment written into law in the U.S. (1958) stated that no chemical found to be carcinogenic in laboratory animals or humans could be added to food. At that time, it meant that the analytic detection level was the limit, but chemistry developed rapidly, and soon small amounts of carcinogenic chemicals could be detected in all foodstuffs. Attitudes towards pesticides changed after the appearance of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and toxicology developed by leaps and bounds. In addition, Bruce Ames’s comment in the 1970s that one molecule could cause cancer especially stimulated the evaluation of carcinogenicity of chemicals.

Risk assessment developed for registration purposes is not transparent

At different times in different countries, a few groups of chemicals were recognized as groups that cannot be marketed without performing toxicity studies and they had to be approved by national authorities. Typically, the three groups about which there was concern were pharmaceuticals, food additives and pesticides; pharmaceuticals and food additives, because they are foreign chemicals deliberately given to people, and pesticides, since they are, by definition, toxic compounds.^[2]

Most of the risk assessment procedures were developed for these purposes, and it also meant that the manufacturer was obliged to provide the authorities with convincing data about the safety of their product. These studies were often performed by commercial laboratories commissioned and paid by the producer of the chemical. This system means that the manufacturers are very protective of the data, and would be most unhappy if it were publicly available, because then their competitors would gain an unfair advantage, i.e. having access to work performed and paid by others. This has lead to different principles being applied here from other scientific activities; most of the toxicity data are seen only by a few government officials and it is not publicly available in the scientific literature.

It is worth considering if it is in anyone’s interests that data crucial for human health should be a closely guarded secret. Should it not be open to scientific criticism, comments by other scientists who would be able to make their own interpretation of the results, and also freely available to those who suffer, as well as simply being able to evaluate if the data are reliable? One of the excellent points in the REACH-program of the European Union is that entrepreneurs are encouraged to buy the data from those who have already conducted studies, rather than repeating them for themselves. In fact, there could be a similar system as with patents: the first firm doing the toxicity studies would make them public through an official channel, and subsequent users of the data would need to buy a license from the original firm to use the data for their own product.

Could also risk assessment be open?

Another perhaps even more dramatic novel departure from the previously somewhat secretive toxicity studies and risk assessment is the idea of performing the whole risk assessment in an open forum comparable to the Wikipedia, open encyclopedia. This would represent also an attempt to combine science and values in a single discussion forum aiming at achieving a synthesis that would be acceptable to all parties. Like Wikipedia, it would be based on web-based information storage and workspaces building on the idea of mass collaboration. The goal of one such attempt, Opasnet, is specifically to provide information for supporting decision making by means of systems analysis.

The fundamental concept of open risk assessment is that a large number of people working together towards a common aim can achieve not only much more but reach their goal also much more rapidly than individual researchers, however bright and productive they are. This also would make it possible to avoid mistakes resulting from preconceived ideas that prevent the free exchange of novel concepts.

It is in the interests of the society and the public that all research used for risk assessment and also the risk assessment process itself are as reliable and as open as possible. Human health should not be based on secret documents. In addition, risk assessment itself could benefit from openness and novel ideas, especially input from individuals outside the groups of professional people normally performing it.

Notes and references