June 4, 1999

Health risks from exposure to chemicals: crucial questions not answered by science Free markets and strong information flow necessary for effective risk management.

"Policy problems relating to health risk from chemicals embody value choices and will not be resolved through more scientific investigation," according to Peter VanDoren, editor of Cato's Regulation magazine and author of a new book published by the Cato Institute, Cancer, Chemicals, and Choices: Risk Reduction through Markets. VanDoren, a political economist who taught at Princeton, Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining the Cato Institute, has written extensively on risk and human health.

"Frequent media reports allege that our health is in constant peril from exposure to chemicals including pesticide-treated food, artificially sweetened beverages, chlorinated swimming pools, and automotive gasoline.

What should we do about such health risks?" asks VanDoren. Conventional risk policy suggests that we ask scientists to tell us how exposure to chemicals affects human health and then let the government regulate exposure using the information provided by scientists. But, he warns, "The belief that more scientific research will answer our policy questions is misguided."

Scientific research will not answer our policy questions for a variety of reasons, according to VanDoren. "The public (and, hence, policy-makers) worries about small levels of increased cancer risk resulting from chemical exposures," but studies of minuscule levels of risk are prohibitively expensive; and some issues cannot be resolved scientifically. Such issues include which compounds should be analyzed in light of limited budgetary resources; how regulators should use research data, given the well-known design flaws of most studies; and should we be more concerned with the need to protect the public from carcinogens or the need to allow products to be developed and sold in the marketplace?

"In the case of chemical exposures that are private goods, government (to the extent that it does anything at all) should limit its activities to the provision of information so individuals can decide for themselves which risks to bear. Command-and-control regulations inhibit the development of robust private information markets because people think that if a product is for sale, the government must have checked it out to ensure that its benefits were greater than its harms."

Copies of the book ($16.95 cloth, $8.95 paper) can be ordered by calling 800-767-1241 or by visiting the Publications Library at the Cato Web site, www.cato.org.

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