Title: From Prevention to Precaution—Valuing Risks
Abstract: The assessment and management of risks of exposure to certain chemicals are hugely important. Obviously, such an assessment needs to encapsulate real-world situations with a margin of safety to ensure “everybody’s” safety once exposed, including the vulnerable young, old, pregnant, and individuals with a compromised immune system. In a nutshell, risk assessment asks ‘How risky is this chemical’?, whereas risk management then asks ‘What shall we do about it’? No matter how careful we might be, in every assessment uncertainty abounds. Scientific knowledge is limited and ever expanding, whereby perspectives on chemicals might change. More than that, every assessment and decision made stands on more than just scientific knowledge; a value judgement is always closely interwoven. Here, the culture we live in expresses itself most poignantly. Precaution as a means to “stay on the safe side of things” or be “better safe than sorry” is prevalent everywhere but never so pronounced as within toxicology. Scientific knowledge, no matter how elaborate, always carries limitations that might make it impossible to characterise all the risks involved. Hazards of certain chemicals, however inarticulate or even purely hypothetical, are in quite a few instances deemed enough to regulate on a precautionary basis. This will be discussed and evaluated in this chapter.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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