A White House Perspective on Risk Communication

The past two decades have ushered in a shift of almost revolutionary proportions in the study of health and disease. The preoccupation with infectious disease has been replaced with a heavy commitment to the study of chronic, life-threatening illnesses. Increasingly, more investigators have recognized that behaviors that place an individual at risk for developing physical illness seldom occur in isolation from other pathogenic activities. Although the public acknowledges that life-style and disease are related (e.g., smoking may be detrimental to your health), the fear of malign influences in our environment is so widespread today that the general public believes that it is those factors they cannot control that will bring about their early demise. Thus, a major concern is the presence of “unwanted” chemicals in our environment.