ABSTRACT
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognized that they could detect carcinogens at levels that had uncertain health implications for people. FDA developed risk analysis to estimate the risk levels associated with carcinogenic food additives. Agencies such as the FDA, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission have published explicit safety goals. The FDA continues to rely on a safety goal that views as trivial a risk of less than one in one million. In 1988, EPA asked for public comment on four alternative safety goals for a community exposed to a carcinogen. The alternative safety goals are no more than one cancer per million people, one cancer per 10,000 people, one cancer a year in the exposed population and an ad hoc rule that commits the agency to nothing. A different way of examining risk goals would be to use a cost-effectiveness criterion.
