Title: Reading: Risk Assessment
Course: BLD 159 Intro to Brownfield Remediation, Land Re-use, and Public Health > Section: BLD 159 Intro to Brownfield Remediation, Land Re-use, and Public Health

Reading: Risk Assessment

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Risk Assessment

We will use a summary of the materials presented in the EPA Planning a Human Health Risk Assessment Web page.  Click here to access the web page. Please note that much of the information in this Web page may be more technical than the level of this course. We will focus on those parts of the material that are useful for this course, which is summarized in this module.

Planning a Human Health Risk Assessment

- Introduction
- Planning
- Step 1
- Step 2
- Step 3
- Step 4

Planning - There is a need to make judgments early when planning major risk assessments regarding the purpose, scope, and technical approaches that will be used. To simplify our discussion of planning the following structure focuses on human health risk assessment.
Risk assessors will typically ask the following questions when planning a human health risk assessment:

Who/What/Where is at risk?

- Individual
- General population
- Lifestages such as children, teenagers, pregnant/nursing women
- Population subgroups - highly susceptible (for example, due to asthma, genetics, etc.) and/or highly exposed (for example, based on geographic area, gender, racial or ethnic group, or economic status)

What is the environmental hazard of concern?

- Chemicals (single or multiple/cumulative risk)
- Radiation
- Physical (dust, heat)
- Microbiological or biological
- Nutritional (for example, diet, fitness, or metabolic state)
- Socio-Economic ( for example, access to health care)

Where do these environmental hazards come from?

- Point sources (for example, smoke or water discharge from a factory; contamination from a Superfund site)
- Non-point sources (for example, automobile exhaust; agricultural runoff)
- Natural sources