Introduction to Risk Assessment

Health and environmental risk assessment is a relatively new field. It is being developed along diverse fronts by experts in distinct disciplines including epidemiology, toxicology, engineering, and statistics. Each of these disciplines has generated at least a few books about risk assessment. However, nearly all such books focus narrowly on specific subsets of available risk assessment methods: namely, those methods that have been developed specifically to address the types of risks with which the author’s discipline is most concerned. Thus, risk assessment literature has become specialized and fragmented.