Figure 1. Current state of risk assessment and decision-making.

Traditional risk assessment approaches, such as those based on deriving points of departure (PoDs), margins of exposure (MoEs), reference doses (RfDs), are focused on ensuring the absence of adverse effects at some (usually imprecisely specified) level of confidence. However, economic analysis usually necessitates prediction of the occurrence of adverse effects in order to characterize societal impacts under different policy options or scenarios, for which limited data are available to support using current risk assessment methods.