Vaccines and the social amplification of risk.

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) named "Vaccine Hesitancy" one of the top 10 threats to global health. Shortly afterward, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as the world's predominant health concern. COVID-19 vaccines of several types have been developed, tested, and partially deployed with remarkable speed; vaccines are now the primary control measure and hope for a return to normalcy.

Through a Glass Darkly: How Natural Science and Technical Communities Looked at Social Science Advances in Understanding Risk.

This article is one piece in a series of articles that reflect on advances in ideas about risk made by social science over the past 40 years and more. It differs from the other articles: its focus is not on specific advances themselves, but rather on how those advances were received and were encouraged or discouraged by the natural science and technical members of the risk community. Thus, the principal goal of this article is to provide some context for the other articlers in this series.

The radiation exposure compensation act: what is fair?

In 1990 the U.S. Congress passed a law providing compensation to former uranium miners who became ill while the U.

Differences in pharmacokinetics between children and adults--II. Children's variability in drug elimination half-lives and in some parameters needed for physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modeling.

In earlier work we assembled a database of classical pharmacokinetic parameters (e.g., elimination half-lives; volumes of distribution) in children and adults.

The history of uranium mining and the Navajo people.

From World War II until 1971, the government was the sole purchaser of uranium ore in the United States. Uranium mining occurred mostly in the southwestern United States and drew many Native Americans and others into work in the mines and mills. Despite a long and well-developed understanding, based on the European experience earlier in the century, that uranium mining led to high rates of lung cancer, few protections were provided for US miners before 1962 and their adoption after that time was slow and incomplete.