[Comment on the perception of risk and its relationship to advancements in health knowledge].

Since World War II, industrialized Western societies have been making significant public investments that have yielded spectacular improvements in the health status of their populations. Yet despite such considerable strides, it is nonetheless evident that lay peoples are expressing both more scepticism than in the past and greater mistrust toward medical science and biomedicine, even as they show increasing concern about health risks. In this article we intend to discuss some of the broader opportunities that the analysis of lay risk perceptions offers for appreciating the concerns of lay peoples about health-related issues as well as to provide new insights in population health.