How Much Risk A Guide to Understanding Environmental Health Hazards [Hardcover]

An excellent critical analysis and scientific assessment of the nature and actual level of risk leading environmental health hazards pose to the public. Issues such as radiation from nuclear testing, radon in the home, and the connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer, environmental factors and asthma, pesticides and breast cancer and leukemia clusters around nuclear plants are discussed, and how scientists assess these risks is illuminated. This book will enable readers to better understand environmental health issues, and with the proper scientific understanding, make informed, rational decisions about them.

Preface
1. Introduction: What We Hope to Do
2. Atomic Bombs, Nuclear Fallout, and Dental X-Rays
3. Radon in Your Basement
4. Childhood Leukemia Near Nuclear Plants
5. Breast Cancer, Part 1: The Rise of Activism and the Pesticide Hypothesis
6. Breast Cancer, Part 2: Testing the Pesticide Hypothesis
7. Power Lines, Magnetic Fields, and Cancer
8. Cancer from the Landfill?
9. Asthma, Allergy, and Air Pollution
10. Summary: Lessons from a Disaster
Bibliography
Index

The main intention of this book is to explain to a wide audience key concepts in environmental health, particularly environmental epidemiology, by using several high-profile issues as illustrations....These chapters were developed logically, with progressive construction of a framework of basic epidemiologic concepts, such as confounding, selection bias, statistical significance and power, confidence intervals, multiple comparisons, and casual inference criteria. --American Journal of Epidemiology