Assessment of the risk of chronic lung injury attributable to long-term ozone exposure

摘要

This paper presents an application that illustrates the use of formal methods for the encoding of experts' probabilistic judgments in the context of a risk assessment. Such a risk assessment can, of course, provide valuable information to those responsible for important policy decisions. The work described here is part of a larger risk assessment project sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The purpose of this research is to characterize scientific judgment regarding the risk of chronic lung injury to children aged 8 through 16 and adult outdoor workers due to long-term ozone exposure in areas with patterns of exposure similar to those found in Southern California and the Northeast. The measure of injury is the incidence of mild or moderate lesions in the centriacinar region of the lung. Probabilities over population response rates were elicited from six health experts actively researching ozone-induced lung injury. The authors describe their approach, present some judgmental probability distributions over the population response rates for formation of lesions induced by exposure to ozone, summarize some qualitative results, and offer some concluding comments.