Preface, Risk Commission Final Report, Vol. The Commission was assembled in May 1994. Our members included specialists in public health, occupational and environmental health, medicine, pediatrics, toxicology, epidemiology, engineering, law, and public policy.
Members also have experience in federal, state, and local governments.
We held hearings across the country to obtain input from interested and concerned parties. The information and insights provided by these forums, as well as public comments on our June 1996 Draft Report, provided valuable contributions to our deliberations, findings, and recommendations. A clear need to modify the traditional approaches used to assess and reduce risks emerged as a major theme from our deliberations. They tend to focus attention on refining assumption-laden mathematical estimates of the small risks associated with exposures to individual chemicals, rather than on the overall goal of reducing risk and improving health status. We set forth principles for making good risk management decisions and for actively engaging stakeholders in the process.