Comment on Hoffman et al.

摘要

Dear Editors:In "Beyond Dose Assessment: Using Risk With Full Disclosure Of Uncertainty in Public And Scientific Communication," Hoffman et al. (2011) strongly argue for using quantitative measures of risk with uncertainty, rather than dose, as a means to better communicate the impact on human health from radiation exposure. The authors note that currently, we focus on "annual dose, without explicitly [emphasis added] evaluating the health risk associated with those exposures, principally the risk of radiation-induced cancer." The word explicitly is defined as "fully and clearly expressed or demonstrated; leaving nothing merely implied; clearly developed or formulated." I would argue that an expression of quantitative risk of stochastic disease from relatively low doses of radiation is anything but explicit.