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Human health risk assessment: numbers alone are not enough - words matter
Event type:
Regional Group, Evening meeting
Organised by:
East Midlands Regional Group
Venue:
British Geological Survey Keyworth
Event status:
EVENT CLOSED
Paul Nathanail from Land Quality Management Ltd is presenting this month on contaminated land management.
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers” – Plato
Risk assessment is not a science. Risk assessment is about making decisions. Decisions anchored in science and reflective of society’s appetite to accept risk and willingness to pay for its reduction. Human exposure to soil and groundwater contamination can harm us. Directly through ingestion of soil, inhalation of vapours, fibres and dust or absorption through the skin. Or indirectly through contaminant uptake through the food chain or as a response to damage caused by exploding ground gases.
The toxicological basis of screening values determines the level of risk such values are intended – and indeed are able – to protect against. Health Criterial Values (HCV) represent minimal levels of risk from non-threshold behaviour and negligible risk from threshold behaviour. Government advice is that synergistic or antagonistic effects arising out of exposures to mixtures are therefore unlikely at exposures below the HCV.
We use screening values to eliminate from further consideration contaminants that may be deemed to require no further attention. Such screening values must fulfil specific criteria to be reliable and robust reasons for eliminating a substance from further attention. The number is not enough. It needs units, context, meta-data to be used reasonably.
Paul Nathanail is a Chartered European Geologist and Specialist in Land Condition. He has some 25 years’ experience in risk-based contaminated land management as a consultant, researcher, teacher and policy shaper. He is a part Chair and Secretary of the Environment Group, currently serves on the committee of the Contaminated land specialised group and represented the Society on the SiLC Panel and the national Brownfield Land Forum. Paul delivered the Glossop Lecture in 2009.
Paul will discuss the role of geologists – and others - in risk-based contaminated land management given the current focus on house building and the lessons from reaction to environmental contamination in recent months. Follow Paul on twitter: @cpnathanail