Selecting human health metrics for environmental decision-support tools
Patrick Hofstetter1, James K Hammitt
1U.S. EPA, National Risk Management Research Laboratory, USA. patrick_hofstetter@yahoo.com
Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis
|November 22, 2002
Summary
Choosing the right human health metric is crucial for environmental decision-making. Different metrics like Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) significantly alter impact rankings.
Area of Science:
- Environmental Health
- Risk Assessment
- Public Health Policy
Background:
- Environmental decision-support tools rely on human health metrics to aggregate diverse health outcomes.
- Selecting appropriate metrics is vital for accurate environmental impact assessment and decision-making.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if the choice of human health metric impacts environmental impact rankings.
- To identify key characteristics of metrics for environmental decision-support tools.
Main Methods:
- Applied three human health metrics: Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), and Willingness to Pay (WTP).
- Utilized a diverse set of health effects from environmental impacts for comparative analysis.
Main Results:
- The selection of metric significantly influenced the ranking of environmental impacts.
- Willingness to Pay (WTP) was found to be heavily weighted towards mortality outcomes.
- QALYs and DALYs demonstrated sensitivity to mild illnesses affecting large populations, with challenges in assessing severity.
Conclusions:
- The choice of human health metric is critical and affects environmental decision-making outcomes.
- Guidance is provided through eight questions to aid metric selection for environmental decision-support tools.
- Distributional and ethical considerations, alongside age-dependent mortality disutility, warrant further research.
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