Risk assessment: Quantifying uncertainty in health effects

This paper proposes a health risk assessment procedure for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is setting national ambient air quality standards. The procedure, derived from applications of decision analysis to problems of air pollution control, involves the development and analysis of a ''health effects outcome calculator,'' relies on formal methods of probability encoding, and makes extensive use of sensitivity analysis to direct modeling and encoding effort toward those factors most critical to the assessment.