ABSTRACT
Quantitative cancer risk assessment has become an integral part of regulatory decisionmaking. The explicit treatment of uncertainty in quantitative assessment of health risk has been a concern for at least a decade. Quantitative risk assessments have tended to present either abstract individual risk levels or “body counts”. The field of risk communication is growing rapidly. Many regulatory agencies already employ “risk communicators” to interface with the public. The risk communications movement will clearly have an impact on risk analysis, although the nature of that impact may be difficult to predict. People doing quantitative health risk analysis may become much more involved in public communication as well as becoming an important link between the biomedical research scientist and the risk communicator. Cost-effectiveness has increasingly become recognized as a powerful way to express health risk in terms that make sense when developing a budget.
