Minutes Autumn symposium 2024
With this autumn symposium, organised by the section Risk Assessment from the Dutch Society for Toxicology (NVT), it was aimed to demonstrate the latest methodology and model development in the management of uncertainties in risk assessment. Speakers from RIVM, KWR and EFSA were invited to show their applications.
The symposium was started with an introductory presentation on probabilistic approaches, presented by Bas Bokkers a risk assessor and toxicologist from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, NL). With this presentation insight was provided on probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) compared to deterministic risk assessment. The differences, advantages and disadvantages of both approaches were explained, showing that PRA can provide more informative conclusions including variability and uncertainty.
The applicability and usage of APROBA-Plus tool was subsequently demonstrated by Judith de Heer. Judith is a researcher working at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, NL). During this session the usage of APROBA-Plus for deterministic compared to a probabilistic risk calculations was given. Multiple examples were showed on how to use and interpreted APROBA-Plus retrieved results.
The usage of APROBA-Plus for probabilistic risk assessment in a drinking water case study was presented by Renske Hoondert. Renske is a researcher and project manager working at KWR. During this case-study presentation the steps taken in PRA were explained to characterise the uncertainties and support better risk assessment to improve risk management.
During the final session Ullrika Sahlin an Associate Professor from Lund University provided an introduction to the need and methodology of expert knowledge elicitation (EKE), and how this can be used to support the characterisation of uncertainty in risk assessment. Ullrika has been an independent expert in EFSAs cross cutting working group on uncertainty and is currently providing trainings and support in EKE for EFSA. The audience were told that EKE was developed to counteract bias in expert judgement, as a systematic documented and reviewable process and uses probability to express uncertainty.