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This week the Joint Legislative Air Pollution Control and Conservation Committee chaired by Rep. Scott Hutchinson (R-Venango) hosted another in a series of Environmental Issues Forums, this time on the topic of the environment and health risks.
Joel Hersh, Director of the Bureau of Epidemiology at the Department of Health, gave a presentation on Pennsylvania’s efforts as part of the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program.
Jolene Chinchilli, a member of DEP’s Citizens Advisory Council, spoke on “How Does the Public Perceive Risk? Why the Facts Aren’t Enough.”
Joel Hersh noted public health agencies have done a good job over the years identifying and preventing infectious diseases, but they came late to the game in dealing with the health affects caused by environmental factors.
In 2002 Pennsylvania received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control to establish a pilot program, along with 16 other states, to see if health and environmental officials could identify and even anticipate impacts on public health based from environmental and health measurements. The correlation between hazards, exposures and disease outcomes would then be used to develop policies and programs to correct both the health and environmental problems.
The program and grants were prompted in part by a 2001 Pew Commission/John Hopkins Report that found that health tracking in the U.S. was disjointed or nonexistent.
Working with the Department of Environmental Protection and a special project advisory committee, the Department of Health and other health officials around the state chose asthma to study links between the environment and disease.
The project will rank school districts in the state based on the numbers of students with asthma; determine the risk factors present in school and at home for causing the disease and relate that information to the levels of air pollution inside and outside their school and living environment. They will then make recommendations on how to deal with the health and environmental problems they identify.
The project is expected to run through 2005. For more information contact David Marchetto, Department of Health, 717-787-1708.
Jolene Chinchilli, who has a Masters in Public Health and a Certificate in Risk Analysis in Environmental Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, started by saying both the public and experts are often frustrated in their attempts to understand their differing perceptions of environmental and health risk.
Experts often don’t understand that facts and data are not enough to convince people something is safe or won’t hurt them, especially when they are not the ones at direct risk. The public is frustrated because they don’t get information in a way that is meaningful to them.
A number of factors influence the perception of risk by the public—
· Knowledge - for most people, facts have relatively little affect on estimates or tolerance of risks and initial impressions are very persistent even in the face of contrary evidence.
· Acceptability - most people don't worry about long-term concerns like global warming or familiar risks like a problem that’s always been there or if they voluntarily engage in a risk like smoking.
· Availability - people are more concerned about a risk if it is sensational or they think they can be directly affected by it .
· Presentation - how something is presented can minimize or exaggerate a risk, for example, you can say 68 percent of people having a particular surgery survive 32 percent die, both are accurate but the presentation is different.
· Personal Immunity - people tend to believe they are immune to many hazards, they feel that accidents happen to "others," are frequently in denial and some believe they are above average when it comes to “catching something.”
· Trust - the trust people place in experts has eroded, people are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and people have a "hindsight bias" when looking at events after the fact that should have been clear at the time.
· Individual vs. Societal Perspective - experts take a societal approach in describing how something might affect an overall population, while people prefer individualized information. If it happened to them it’s bad.
Chinchilli noted that much of the information she presented is based on the papers and books of Paul Slovic of Decision Research.
She then offered some dos and don’ts: give the public meaningful opportunities to define problems and evaluate solutions up front; don’t compare risks; be careful of ethical issues in presenting (spinning) risk information; understand people do want information about risks – ignorance is not bliss; and “experts may have all the facts, but not all the possible perspectives.
You can contact Ms. Chinchilli through the DEP Citizens Advisory Council at 717-787-4527 or by email to: suswilson@state.pa.us
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