Provided expertise for the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology's (BEST) Committee on the Future of Risk Assessment
Mike Callahan, Senior Scientist at MDB, Inc., was asked to provide expertise for distinguished research institutions regarding uncertainty in risk assessment.
In February 2007, Mr. Callahan was asked to provide expert advice to the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology's (BEST) Committee on the Future of Risk Assessment, regarding the need for changes in community-based risk assessment. Mr. Callahan concluded that not all potential harms are included in community-based risk assessment, and he also noted that communities and tribes that have harms directly related to typical chemical pollution are not included. In late 2007, Inside EPA published an article stating that based on Mr. Callahan's advice, the BEST Committee is considering changing the risk-assessment "Red Book" to focus more on community-based cumulative risk assessment.
In January 2008, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Institute of Medicine (IOM) requested that Mr. Callahan help craft a formal, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-wide process to manage and communicate better the massive amounts of data that accompany uncertainty analysis. In his NAS panel presentation on how EPA makes decisions in light of uncertainty, Mr. Callahan highlighted how scientists and typical decision makers look at uncertainty quite differently and argued for the importance of telling decision makers what the uncertainty calculations do not include. He used risk assessment as an example, pointing out that assessors may focus on threats that will never happen while ignoring others that are almost guaranteed to cause real health effects. Mr. Callahan went on to note that this never shows up as an uncertainty in a conventional risk assessment, yet it is precisely the type of information most needed by decision makers who want to know what types of uncertainties may make their decisions wrong.
