Quantitative health risk analysis methods. Modeling the human health impacts of antibiotics used in food animals. (Q820228)

This book grew out of an effort to salvage a potentially useful idea for greatly simplifying traditional quantitative risk assessments of the human health consequences of using antibiotics in food animals. As a foundation for its risk assessment model, the Center for Veterinary Medicine in USA proposed a simple approach that skipped many of the steps in traditional risk assessment. The content of this book is the following: 1. Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Analysis; 2. Risk Analysis: Goals and Methods; 3. Hazard Identification; 4. Exposure Assessment; 5. Dose-Response Modeling and Risk Characterization; 6. Human Health Risks from Virginiamycin: A Case Study; 7. Dynamic Modeling and Uncertainty Analysis; 8. Potential Human Health Benefits of Animal Antibiotics. Notable improvements and increased scientific rigor in public health risk assessment and risk management can be expected from the insightful approaches lucidly described in this book. It is truly a pioneering study in this previously underdeveloped area of applied risk assessment. This book should be highly instructive to those interested in attempting to model potential human risks of antimicrobial resistance from complex food exposure pathways. It demonstrates the practical power of data-driven quantitative risk assessment in improving modeling of human health risks created and prevented by antibiotics used in food animals. The book is a tremendous reference resource which provides simple and, most importantly, usable methods to estimate quantitative human health impacts of animal antibiotics from existing data, and has applications to many other important public health risk topics. The major goal of this book is to provide and illustrate methods for quantitative risk assessment and for comparing alternative risk management actions, given realistic limitations on scientific knowledge and available data.