Impact of Random Variables Probability Distribution on Public Health Risk Assessment from Contaminated Soil

Abstract

Probabilistic methods are now being applied increasingly to public health risk assessment instead of the deterministic, conservative, point estimates. An essential part of the probabilistic methods is the selection of probability distribution functions to represent the uncertainty of the random variables considered. We study the effect of selection of different probability distribution functions on the probabilistic outcome using the first-order reliability method (FORM). An example of cancer risk resulting from dermal contact with benzo(a)pyrene (BaP)-contaminated soil is given. Cancer potency factor, soil concentration, and fraction of skin area exposed were assigned normal, lognormal, and uniform probability distribution functions, and the effect of probability of exceeding a target risk level (termed the probability of failure) and sensitivity measures were studied. We investigated the question: what happens when one assumes different distribution shapes with the same mean and standard deviation? The results indicate that the selection of a probability distribution function for the random variables had a moderate impact on the probability of failure when the target risk is at the 50th percentile level, while the impact was much larger for a 95th target risk percentile. We conclude that the probability distribution will have a large impact because in most cases the regulatory threshold risk is at the tail end of the risk distribution. The impact of the distributions on probabilistic sensitivity, however, showed a reversed trend, where the impact was slightly more appreciable for the 50th percentile than for the 95th percentile. The selection of distribution shape did not, however, alter the order of probabilistic sensitivity of the basic random variables.