Citation

Ozonoff D. Int. J. Occup. Med. Environ. Health 2004; 17(1): 35-41.

Affiliation

Department of Environment Health, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02118, USA. dozonoff@bu.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine, Lodz and the Polish Association of Occupational Medicine, Publisher Walter de Gruyter)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

15212204

Abstract

An important part of the Precautionary Principle is that taking action is justified for protecting public health even when there is some scientific uncertainty. We examine here the two components of this central feature of the precautionary principle, scientific uncertainty and decision making. In order to operationalize the principle we should examine the consequences of its decision rules and how they perform under various conditions. The performance of decision rules in disease screening is measured by the sensitivity and specificity of the rule, but the consequences for the patient are given by the positive and negative predictive values, determined not only by the performance of the rule but the prevalence of the disease in the population. We look at positive and negative predictive value of the Precautionary Principle from the standopoint of the costs to one or other parts of society, show that the usual rule which tends to maximize sensitivity in favor of specificity may have unexpected consequences, and demonstrate that it is sometimes possible to trade sensitivity and specificity off against each other in a way that improves both positive and negative predictive value, or worse, degrades both.

Language: en