Understanding Health Risk Calculations :: Medical Medicine

savvy Health Risk CalculationsHealth risks ar all around us. They atomic number 18 present all the time, even when we sleep. Understanding our put on the lines of being affected by one risk or another(prenominal) is a little like understanding our chances of win the lottery. Numbers are often used to describe both our health risks and our chances or hazard of winning the lottery, provided this is where the similarity ends. When you buy a lottery ticket, your chances of winning depend on the number of possible combinations of numbers, not on whether you dive your favorite lucky numbers. Every time you buy a ticket, solar day after day, you have the same chance of winning, so your chance whitethorn unendingly be, for example, one in a million. Nothing you or anyone else nominatenister do, short of cheating, can change that chance. Your chance of getting pubic louse from flick to a chemical, however, like your chance of being killed in a fomite accident, is not as easy to understand. This is because conditions that affect your chance are always changing. In the case of a vehicle accident, the road may be slippery, you or another driver may be drunk, your car or another vehicle may get a blow egress at high speed, someone may fall asleep at the wheel, someone may throw a rock from an overpass, or an planing machine may fall from the sky. All of these conditions and many more affect the chance of being involved in an accident. Sometimes you can control the conditions effectively, but most of the time you cant. Your chances of getting cancer from exposure to a accepted chemical also depends on different circumstances or conditions. How farsighted and the frequency at which you are exposed to a chemical, the amount or concentration, your own personal make up or susceptibility, and age are only a few of the variables to be considered when calculating your risk. Some of these conditions you can control, some you cannot. When a scientist calculates ri sks, she or he uses different types of numbers to correct different types of risks. For the risk of someone getting cancer from exposure to a certain chemical at a certain level over the course of a lifetime, there is no way to calculate an individuals charter chance. The best that a scientist can do is to calculate the chance of cancer occurring among, say, one million people.