Abstract
Summary“Weighing” available evidence in the process of decision-making is unavoidable, yet it is one step that routinely raises suspicions: what evidence should be used, how much does it weigh, and whose thumb may be tipping the scales? This commentary aims to evaluate the current state and future roles of various types of evidence for hazard assessment as it applies to environmental health. In its recent evaluation of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System assessment process, the National Research Council committee singled out the term “weight of evidence” (WoE) for critique, deeming the process too vague and detractive to the practice of evaluating human health risks of chemicals. Moving the methodology away from qualitative, vague and controversial methods towards generalizable, quantitative and transparent methods for appropriately managing diverse lines of evidence is paramount for both regulatory and public acceptance of the hazard assessments. The choice of terminology notwithstanding, a number of recent Bayesian WoE-based methods, the emergence of multi criteria decision analysis for WoE applications, as well as the general principles behind the foundational concepts of WoE, show promise in how to move forward and regain trust in the data integration step of the assessments. We offer our thoughts on the current state of WoE as a whole and while we acknowledge that many WoE applications have been largely qualitative and subjective in nature, we see this as an opportunity to turn WoE towards a quantitative direction that includes Bayesian and multi criteria decision analysis.
Highlights
The inexact science of converting existing environmental health and toxicology knowledge into risk management decisions and policy relies on a growing volume of increasingly diverse scientific data
As high impact regulatory decisions continue to be made in hazard assessment and other environmental health applications, the necessity to provide a clear basis for decision-making is becoming increasingly important
The present state of Weight of evidence (WoE), and evidence integration in general, is such that approaches to hazard assessments in toxicology differ greatly between applications, among both qualitative and quantitative assessments
Summary
The inexact science of converting existing environmental health and toxicology knowledge into risk management decisions and policy relies on a growing volume of increasingly diverse scientific data. Past work in this area was guided by a small number of experimental techniques and models. Weight of evidence (WoE) is an approach that, by means of qualitative or quantitative methods, integrates individual lines of evidence to form a conclusion (Linkov et al, 2009) and has been widely used in both ecological and human health risk assessments to collate heterogeneous information and justify selection of regulatory benchmarks. We call for further standardization of WoE tools and provide historical and methodological perspectives to support this aim
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