RESEARCH ARTICLE
Human Health Risk Assessment Under Uncertain Environment and Its SWOT Analysis
Palash Dutta*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 11
First Page: 72
Last Page: 92
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-11-72
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501811010072
Article History:
Received Date: 06/10/2017Revision Received Date: 03/01/2018
Acceptance Date: 02/02/2018
Electronic publication date: 28/02/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Introduction:
Due to release of pollutants, chemical or hazardous materials into the environment from manmade or artificial sources, human being as well as animal populations are affected directly or indirectly through inhalation of air, intake of water, intake of food, dermal contact, etc. Then, human being may suffer from types of health effect such as acute radiation sickness, cancer, teratogenic (fetal) damage, hereditary changes, etc.
Methods:
When harmful materials are discharged into the environment, an assessment is essential to evaluate possible brunt these materials may have on individual health and environment. The basic objective of evaluation of risk is to gauge the severity and possibility of impairment to individual health as of exposure to a substance or bustle can cause impairment to individual health under credible situation. One of the most important aspects of risk assessment is to accumulate knowledge on the features of each and every available data, information and component of the risk model. It has been observed that most frequently model parameters such as, data and information are infected with uncertainty due to lack of precision, deficiency in data, diminutive sample sizes or data acquire from specialist opinion of existing data/information. In such situations, more often Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) is explored to characterize uncertainty.
Results and Conclusions:
Possibility theory enables transforming fuzzy variable into necessity measure and possibility measure that can be used to model uncertainty as well as to carry out risk assessment. Similarly, the emerging development of credibility theory can be considered as one of the uncertainty modelling tools that also has the ability to transform fuzzy variable into credibility distribution function. Therefore, this paper aims to make a comparative study among all the three uncertainty modelling tools to carry out human health risk assessment under uncertain environment. Computer codes have been generated for this purpose using Matlab M-files. Finally, SWOT analysis of health risk assessment has been carried out.
As the proposed tools have the ability to handle uncertainty/imprecision in a proper comportment and therefore, it can be opined that the proposed tools can be efficiently employed in every field where uncertainty/imprecision is involved such as clinical/medical decision making, economics, industrial cost-benefit analysis, other decision making process, etc.
