Our world is chock-full of hazards and risks. Society is often faced with choices that may exchange one hazard for another—for example, decisions about using fluoride in water systems, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in packaging to extend the shelf life of food and medicinal products, benzene in consumer products, ethylene oxide as an ingredient and as a sterilant, and engineered stone over natural stone. Some of these choices are based on demand, some on aesthetics, and some on necessity. Every day, each of us may engage in more risk than we consciously realize.
In the relationship between risk and culture, there are different tolerances for risk, which can be individually based but may also be cultural. Industries that pollute air and water also provide jobs and profits; before requiring pollution controls, public officials usually consider the probable effects of the available options on those benefits. Cities may install traffic lights to reduce fatalities and injuries, but officials might consider whether this is the best way to spend scarce revenues. Decision-makers want good estimates and data on how much each alternative will reduce hazards so that they can judge the potential benefits against the risks and costs, knowing the hazards of concern today are more difficult to observe and rank than those of the past.
“Hazard” can be defined as “[a]n act or phenomenon . . . [that] has the potential to produce harm or other undesirable consequences to some person or thing.” “Risk” is the quantification of hazards “by attaching the probability of being realized to each level of potential harm.” In simple terms, a hazard is something that has the potential to harm, and risk is the likelihood of a hazard causing harm. For example, an area that experiences a severe hurricane once in 200 years faces the same hazard but only one-tenth the risk of a similar area that experiences an equally severe hurricane once in 20 years. Hazards of the same magnitude do not always pose equal risks, nor do risks of the same magnitude pose equal concerns. “Most quantitative measures of risk combine the undesirability of a hazard and its probability of occurrence into a single summary measure.”
Understanding hazards and risks can be difficult. Moreover, risk can be subjective, driven by personal experience, business decisions, and regulatory perception. What can provide clarity in the myriad of distractions—for example, the media, competing science, public perception, and political decisions—is reliable, reproducible, and transparent data. This issue presents three articles on three different concerns seen in society from different hazard/risk perspectives: worker exposures in the engineered stone industry by Rod Harvey; consumer exposures from use of everyday products by Debra Kaden, Robinan Gentry, and Brian Ledger; and ethylene oxide in the ambient air and potential for human health risks by Alex LeBeau.
