Improving Risk Analysis [electronic resource] / by Louis Anthony Cox, Jr.

Causality for Risk Analysts: Improving Our Understanding of How the World Works -- Improving Individual Risk Management Decisions: Learning from Experience and Coping with Model Uncertainty -- Improving Community Risk Management: Managing Disaster Risks -- Improving Organizational Risk Management -- Improving Defense Against Intelligent Adversaries -- Managing Real and Percieved Risks: Animal Antibiotics and Drug-Resistant Infections -- Rethinking the Health Benefits fo Air Pollution Control -- Air Pollution and Health Risk Inequality -- A Causal Model of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) -- Exposure-Response Thresholds for Lung Disease -- An Exposure-Response Threshold for Lung Diseases and Lung Cancer Caused by Crystalline Silica -- Nonlinear Effects of Smoking on Coronary Heart Disease Risk -- Do Cold Weather and Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution Cause Early Deaths in the Elderly? -- Conclusions and Recommendations: What Have We Learned?.

Improving Risk Analysis discusses and illustrates practical methods for assessing, communicating, and managing uncertain risks when the probabilities of consequences caused by alternative actions cannot be quantified with useful confidence, accuracy, and precision. This monograph demonstrates how to avoid these pitfalls by using improved techniques of risk analysis. Through these improved techniques of risk analysis, readers will better understand uncertain risks and be able to make more effective decisions about how to manage them.  The book is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 2 explore the key principles on how high-quality risk analysis can greatly improve the clarity and effectiveness of decisions when the consequences of different choices are uncertain. Part 3 shows in greater detail how these introduced methods can be applied to health effects of air pollution, with emphasis on understanding and modeling causal relations between exposures and responses based on realistically limited and imperfect data. Throughout the book, real-world examples and case studies drawn from health, safety, environmental, and terrorism risk analysis are used and illustrate the practical application of techniques for improving risk analysis.