Sometimes those who work with hazardous materials put theirs lives at risk everyday. They might ask what hazards they are working with, but the real question would be what risk are they putting themselves in? Some people do not understand the difference between hazards and risks because the two subjects are linked with one another.
Hazards occur when an act or an event has a potential to cause harm to a person or thing. This occurrence may have only happened a few times in the past, but the probability of the potential harm is a risk. Risk is a quantitative analysis of a certain hazard. For example, if there is a death toll of one firefighter every ten years in Wilmington, and one firefighter every year in Chicago, the firefighters of Wilmington only face one-tenth of the risk that the firefighters of Chicago face. Even though they are facing the same hazard, the amount of risk is not always the same.
Identification of Hazards
It is difficult to determine if a hazard exists because there are only a few ways to identify hazards. Analysts use experiments on certain hazardous materials, but the cannot possibly test them all, and sometimes it is difficult to connect the effect with the cause. Most tests are done on animals such as rats, mice, hamsters, and rabbits, but it is uncertain what kind of human effects might come from such hazardous materials.
There is a large amount of estimation when it comes to determining a hazard. Because of the changes that some hazardous substances might face while in the process of entering the human body, the substances might have a different effect on humans, which causes the analysts to estimate certain things like exposure, and probability of harm.
Numerical Measurements of Risk
It is difficult to measure risk because the numerical measure depends on science and values. Different analysts used different statistics, such as annual number of fatalities, deaths per person exposed, reduction of life expectancy, and working days lost. Each decision can either make a company or technology look more or less risky. The values that are considered when the measurements are chosen, are what the National Research Council call “discount lives”— whether to give future deaths less weight than present deaths. Analysts also have to consider uncertainty in their information, and give a cushion for mistake.
Understanding Human Influence
With the improvements to technology and science, there is a greater understanding of the potential for human behavior to create hazards. Scientists have proven that illnesses that man once thought were divine, were really caused by human behavior. And according to the National Research Council, modern techniques of detection and analysis can connect events over large distances to reveal the human causes of hazards.
People have also learned that there are little things that they can do that will improve their health and avoid risk. Companies have improved safety measures, many people have stopped smoking, and many have started wearing seat belts in cars to reduce the risk of death in an accident.
The awareness hazards has caused people to feel morally obligated to do things to protect the lives of other people, such as donating blood. Our shared awareness has created major changes in society, creating new public institutions, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The change in society also has an increasing dependency of technology. The economy used technology for the production of food, transportation, medical advancements, and the military. They use technology to avoid future risks in everyday lives in order to increase the life expectancy of people.