Risk Analysis, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2014

DOI: 10.1111/risa.12212

From the Editors

SPECIAL SERIES: RISK ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN CHINA

that less interior decoration and living on lower floors of apartment buildings result in lower exposures. Zhou, Hammitt et al. apply estimated concentrationresponse functions from the epidemiological literature to project the number of “premature deaths per year” that would result from reducing outdoor air pollution in China (assuming that the estimated concentration-response association is causal, as is often done in this literature, and assuming that “premature deaths per year” is a meaningful metric). They note that these projected health benefits might occur in locations remote from where controls are applied, implying a need to coordinate controls across geographic locations. Finally, Feng et al, fit structural equation models (SEMs) to data from surveys of college students to study how their risk perceptions, concerns, and behaviors (e.g., information-seeking) adjusted (and how they co-varied with each other and with trust in the State FDA and in drug companies) following the April, 2012 announcement of excessive chromium levels in drug capsules manufactured in Zhejiang Province.

The first seven articles in this issue address risks in China, helping to illustrate the wide scope and growing importance of the discipline of risk analysis outside the United States and Europe. This cluster of papers was not pre-planned, but arose spontaneously from the fact that the journal is seeing an increase in submissions from China, as well as from other parts of the world. This pattern may in part reflect the successful internationalization efforts of the Society for Risk Analysis, which promotes greater engagement of scientific and policy analysis communities worldwide in applying risk analysis to support and improve important risk management policies and decisions. The articles span a range of topics of interest to our readers. Mok and Hamilton assess the risks to consumers from rotavirus disease from wastewater used to water vegetables. They conclude on the basis of quantitative microbial risk assessment that measures such as reducing concentrations of rotavirus will be needed to meet WHO guidance for safety in water reuse. Zhou, Li et al. use factor analysis of census data to create a social vulnerability index. They use this index to examine the spatial distribution of China’s societal vulnerability to natural disasters at the county level between 1980 and 2010. They identify emerging areas of social vulnerability to natural disasters (e.g., along the eastern coastal area) and suggest how such geospatial information can help to guide the allocation of protective resources to vulnerable communities. Liao et al. also use geographic data and a combination of geospatial and econometric analyses to identify hot spots of concern for moving pastoral populations to other occupations and more settled lifestyles. Chen et al. draw on a combination of uncertainty representation ideas from Dempster-Shafer belief functions and fuzzy set theory to assess land subsidence risks on the basis of hazard and vulnerability ratings. Two papers focus on air pollution health effects. Xu and Shu simulate individual exposures over a lifetime to PAHs in urban dust in Beijing, and conclude

RISK PERCEPTION Which will change intended future behaviors more, discovering that the true value of a risk or exposure variable is smaller than expected, or discovering that it is larger than expected? In the case of claimed exposures to toxins from everyday products (presented to subjects as real), Sweeny and Dillard report that undergraduate students who had been primed by survey questions to expect relatively low exposures were more likely to say that they intended to reduce their exposures after being told that their own individual exposures were higher than expected than were students who had been led to expect relatively high exposures and who were then informed that their own exposures were lower than expected. Students in both conditions were told they had the same numerical value of personal exposure, in ppm, but those who expected lower values were disappointed, which prompted an intent to reduce

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600 exposures, compared to those who expected higher exposures. (Strikingly, students did not appear to suspect that the cover story, in which dozens of ppm for “toxin levels” were said to result from ordinary product exposures, was not plausible.) Can desire for fairness encourage decisions that are needlessly inconvenient, costly, and ineffective for everyone? Scurich and John report the results of survey research in which respondents were asked to choose between traditional airport screening (100% of people are screened for contraband, but the screening has a positive error rate) and a proposed more efficient and effective randomized screening approach in which people are randomly selected for more thorough screening. Although the proposed approach was perceived as more convenient, and although it was designed to produce lower risks (less undetected contraband) than the traditional method, respondents generally considered the traditional method safer and fairer. Respondent preferences were about evenly split between the two methods, even though a dispassionate risk calculation that sought to minimize inconvenience per unit of risk reduction benefit produced would have strongly favored the proposed randomized screening approach. This fascinating study raises the question of how choices among risk management programs should be made when public perceptions and preferences do not align with the results of benefit-cost analyses in identifying the most efficient and effective choices. As benefit-cost analysis methods are increasingly used to help inform risk management decisions, this policy question is likely to arise more often. Similarly, the final article in this issue further examines the potential tension between System 1 judgments and System 2 analyses (e.g., risk perceptions and intuitive evaluations vs. more formal risk calculations) and notes that even relatively formal risk analysis procedures contain their own heuristics and biases, which affect everything from selection of models to rules for interpreting evidence for causality. These heuristics are discussed in the context of chemical risk assessment at EPA. HOW CAN LIBRARIES IMPROVE COMMUNITY RESILIENCE AND DISASTER RECOVERY? In addition to providing information, libraries can provide contact lists, internet access, shelter, electricity, facilities for command centers, supply distribution points, assistance in filling out FEMA and

From the Editors insurance forms, and other services that help communities during and following disasters. Veil and Bishop consider how libraries can best fulfill their roles, designated by FEMA in 2010, as essential community organizations. Using qualitative research based on the experiences of libraries following tornadoes, Veil and bishop identify key roles that libraries have played and can play in future to help communities recover from disasters. These range from providing a repository for accounts of the disastrous events to providing internet access and a sense of comfort and normalcy to people who have just lost homes, businesses, and jobs. EXPOSURES AND HEALTH RISKS Fear that mercury from thimerosal, once used as a preservative in childhood multidose vaccines, might cause autism or otherwise harm infants, has led some parents to avoid infant vaccines. Mitkus et al. used monkey data to develop a Bayesian hierarchical pharmacokinetic model (with population prior parameters, population parameters, and individual parameters sampled from the population distribution of parameters) for infant body burden of mercury due to thimerosal from inactivated influenza vaccines in the U.S. They find that concentrations and areasunder-curve (including for low birth weight infants) are much smaller (e.g., by two orders of magnitude for AUCs) than levels from acceptable daily intakes of MeHg in diet, confirming a substantial margin of safety for thimerosal-related exposures. Food microbial safety has benefitted tremendously from the introduction of hazard analysis and critical control point (HAACP) methods. Lambomi et al. propose a new method, multivariate factor mapping (MFM), for using stochastic simulation models to link food process parameters to food safety objectives, taking into account interactions among multiple uncertain inputs. MFM uses data analysis of simulation model results to determine how to constrain key (“influential”) inputs to keep all outputs (e.g., microbial levels) within desired target ranges with high confidence. BOOK REVIEW This issue closes with a review, written by Professor Susan Dudley of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, of Stuart Shapiro and Debora Borie-Holtz’s The Politics of Regulatory Reform. Professor Dudley notes that the book

From the Editors provides some empirical evidence for the hypothesis that regulatory reform initiatives are often motivated by political goals such as getting credit from constituents for opposing overregulation, or being able to influence individual rulemaking procedures without repealing applicable statutes. In the future, the intersection among politics (and political economy), regulation, and risk analysis is likely to become in-

601 creasingly important and well recognized. Future papers are welcome in the Policy Area of Risk Analysis that address and clarify how risk analysis can be used in practice to improve decisions, policy-making, and risk regulation. Tony Cox, Editor-in-Chief and Karen Lowrie, Managing Editor

From the editors.

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