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Auflistung nach Autor:in "McLaughlin, Christina"

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  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Drilling Down Multiple Data Sources for Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Analyses: The Story of a “Tomato Mashup” for an Integrated Approach.
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Environmental Protection: Concepts, Methods and Tools, 2009) McLaughlin, Christina
    Public health agencies responsible for food safety are facing many information challenges as food production and distribution systems, become increasingly complex. Integrated risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses can help decision makers choose appropriate policies to address major public health problems. One component of an integrated analysis is the exposure assessment. The exposure assessment is the probability of exposure to a particular food associated with a particular hazard or nutrient. The probability of exposure can be characterized by integrating relevant supply chain information in a model. However, as terabytes of information are being generated for multiple purposes and by diverse entities and institutions, analysts are often encumbered by efforts in finding relevant data or deciding how to choose the best data for their analyses. Thanks to developments in informatics, some of the tools used by analysts such as decision support technologies can better highlight the merits that a model can achieve because they allow integrating multiple data sources, visualizing the data –geographically, as an influence diagram or other form of graphical expression-and also provide an interface that prevents the separation of end users from analysts. This is better illustrated by following a tomato through different points in the supply chain. The data from different sources can be made relevant in estimating both probability -based and frequency-based consumption and exposure to potential hazards or nutrients.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Informatics of Risk Assessment and Economics: Putting it all Together in Health and Safety Decision Making
    (Environmental Informatics and Industrial Ecology, 2008) McLaughlin, Christina
    Health and safety regulatory agencies worldwide are moving towards adopting a risk-informed regulatory framework. Risk management or decision making can be complicated because it is hard to balance the interests of the different stake holders affected a decision. Economics provides methods to characterize trade-offs and – if not necessarily pointing to a single optimal decision – provides decision makers with better information when making difficult choices among options. Risk assessment provides methods on how to use probabilistic techniques instead of deterministic calculations when deciding among options. The analytical tools in risk assessment and economics are not only useful in pointing toward better decisions, but they are also useful in highlighting data gaps and therefore help inform decisions regarding data needs for research. As an increasing amount of information is collected, managed, and disseminated by a number of diverse institutions, the need to convert the information to practical use is becoming more challenging. For example, while vast amounts of consumer related data sources are available in both public and non-public domains, it is difficult to recognize the usefulness or analytical potential of the data because of the way the data is collected, interpreted, stored, or presented. This presentation will address how developments in information technology are ushering in new advantages and challenges in the areas of risk assessment and economics of health and safety regulations. It will also address how economic theory can help identify and prioritize different data needs. The main focus will be to illustrate how improvements in informatics have helped bring to light the advantages of different models for estimating the impacts of public or private actions that affect health and safety. Developments in informatics have been particularly useful in building architectures that allow communication across multiple entities, stakeholder, and disciplines — i.e. improved communication among economists and scientists but also between the regulated and the regulator.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Risk Assessment, Cost-Benefit Analysis and Knowledge Management in Food Safety Risk Analysis: An Economist’s Perspective on Tools for Decision Making
    (Environmental Informatics and Systems Research, 2007) McLaughlin, Christina
    Risk analysis is the framework for decision makers and regulators to use risk assessment, risk management, costbenefit analysis (CBA), and risk communication in order to reduce the public impact of risks, especially, health and safety risks. The primary mission of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) is to protect the public health by ensuring that food is safe. Decision makers rely on a risk analysis framework to evaluate risk management options for implementing food safety programs and policies. The standard paradigm states that risk analysis is made up of three components: risk assessment, risk management and risk communication. It is also argued that components should be kept separate in the interest of scientific integrity and to make sure results are not affected by political pressure. However, it is important to maintain interaction among the different components of risk analysis so that the risk assessment along with the CBA can aid risk management in decision making. CBA needs to be part of risk analysis.