Risk analysis for environmental health triage

Area of Science:

• Environmental Health
• Risk Assessment
• Emergency Preparedness

Background:

• The Homeland Security Act mandates a national, risk-based system for managing emergencies involving toxic exposures.
• Current emergency response systems define consequences by mapping areas exceeding Acute Exposure Guideline Levels (AEGLs).
• AEGLs are protective but do not estimate expected risks, potentially misguiding consequence management.

Purpose of the Study:

• To highlight the limitations of AEGLs in predicting casualties for emergency response triage.
• To advocate for a new assessment approach focusing on estimated casualties for effective chemical risk management.
• To emphasize the need for federal agency coordination in developing new triage methods.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of current emergency response consequence management strategies.
• Evaluation of the utility of AEGLs in predicting casualties under resource constraints.
• Identification of the need for novel assessment approaches for environmental health triage.

Main Results:

• AEGL-exceedance zones are insufficient for aggregating, comparing, or calculating expected casualties.
• Current methods based on AEGLs can mislead critical triage decisions in toxic exposure scenarios.
• Existing environmental health tools are inadequate for chemical risk triage.

Conclusions:

• Effective chemical risk triage necessitates a shift from individual risk bounds to best estimates of likely casualties.
• New methods are required to support environmental health triage in emergency response.
• Federal agencies must collaborate to develop and implement these new risk-based consequence management approaches.