A spatio-temporal hierarchical Markov switching model for the early detection of influenza outbreaks

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - Rapidly detecting the beginning of influenza outbreaks helps health authorities to reduce their impact. Accounting for the spatial...     

Development of a surrogate model and sensitivity analysis for spatio-temporal numerical simulators

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - To evaluate the consequences on human health of radionuclide releases in the environment, numerical simulators are used to model the...     

Regional response of dengue fever epidemics to interannual variation and related climate variability

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - Dengue is a major international public health concern and one of the most important vector-borne diseases. The purpose of this article is to...     

Risk assessment of offshore oil and gas activities in the Netherlands

Offshore oil and gas activities may lead to a conflict between the protection of the marine environment and health and safety aspects. Priority given to the protection of the marine environment may have an impact on the health or safety of the people working offshore and/or the integrity of the offshore installation. Previous health and safety protection measures are now known to create large-scale effects on the environment, e.g. the application of polychlorinated biphenyls as a cooling medium in transformers and the application of the ozone-depleting halons for efficient fire protection. Risk assessment, taking all health and safety aspects into account, may be the primary mechanism to justify operational procedures agreed by the national authorities as well as by the Exploration and Production industry. Risk assessment of health and safety aspects uses several models which are applied when designing new offshore installations. Several models, which have been developed in the last couple of years, are now available for the assessment of the environmental risk. This paper considers the need for the application of risk assessment with respect to all aspects, health, safety and environment, in order to determine a balanced set of priorities and protection measures.     

Evaluating severity–area–frequency (SAF) of seasonal droughts in Bangladesh under climate change scenarios

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - Drought is considered to be one of the most devastating natural hazards, causing widespread environmental and social damage in many parts of...     

Synthetic scenario generation of monthly streamflows conditioned to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation: application to operation planning of hydrothermal systems

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - The Brazilian Interconnected Power System is hydro dominated and characterized by large reservoirs presenting multi-year regulation...     

Short-term water quality variable prediction using a hybrid CNN–LSTM deep learning model

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - Water quality monitoring is an important component of water resources management. In order to predict two water quality variables, namely...     

Improved space–time sea surface salinity mapping in Western Pacific ocean using contingogram modeling

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - In the context of statistical correlation theory and geostatistics, the covariance function has been widely used to characterize the...     

Acute health problems related to the operation mounted to clean the Hebei Spirit oil spill in Taean, Korea

The authors investigated acute health problems in people engaged in the operation mounted to clear the Hebei Spirit oil spill which occurred in December 2007 in Taean County, South Korea, and identified the risk factors associated with the development of symptoms.Eight hundred forty-six people engaged in the clean up operation for periods between 7 and 14 days were examined. Demographic information and risk factors were obtained using a questionnaire. Symptoms were classified into six categories: back pain, skin lesions, headache, and eye, neurovestibular, and respiratory symptoms.Residents and volunteers engaged in the Hebei Spirit oil spill clean up operation experienced acute health problems. Risk analyses revealed that more frequent and greater exposure was strongly associated with a higher occurrence of symptoms.     

An errors-in-variables model based on the Birnbaum–Saunders distribution and its diagnostics with an application to earthquake data

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - Regression modelling where explanatory variables are measured with error is a common problem in applied sciences. However, if inappropriate...     

POPs in edible clams from different Italian and European markets and possible human health risk

Human intake of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) occurs primarily through diet and fish and other seafood represent the principal means of contamination. Despite this, few legal limits have been established to protect human health from the various chemicals that are alleged to be carcinogenic or endocrine disruptor compounds.Several pools of edible clams (Tapes philippinarum and Venus gallina) bought in different Italian and European markets were examined in order to perform a risk assessment of some of these contaminants and also to identify possible health issues. POP concentrations in the soft tissues of mollusks varied considerably among source farming sites, particularly in the Venice Lagoon. Some POPs (DDTs, HCB and HCHs) showed very low concentrations and no risk for human health, in line with the limits established by European law. In contrast, PAHs could represent a potential hazard for human health and PCB levels in the most contaminated sites reached or even exceed the Minimal Risk Level as set by the ATSDR for human consumption, even if all the samples did not exceed the PCB limits in edible seafood as set by the FDA.     

Modelling and attributing evapotranspiration changes on China’s Loess Plateau with Budyko framework considering vegetation dynamics and climate seasonality

Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment - The Grain for Green Project in China’s Loess Plateau has significantly increased the vegetation coverage (M) since it was implemented...     

关于“城市活断层探测与地震危险性评价工作大纲(试行)”的几点认识

“十五”期间即将实施20个省会级城市的活断层探测与地震危险性评价工程。文中对该工程的技术指导性文件“城市活断层探测与地震危险性评价工作大纲(试行)”的基本内容和领会要点进行了阐述。对“工作大纲”的5大属性(科学性、普适性、包容性、可操作性、约束性)作了说明,对探测工程的主要对象活断层和地震活断层进行了界定,对工作区和目标区的内涵及工作途径的差别做了解释。分析了工程所面对的3个层次的科学问题和实施过程中的5个步骤,并对每个步骤中需要注意的事项和应采取的对策分别进行了探讨。文章阐述了探测过程中安排中期验收的必要性,指出本工程是以往各震害防御工作的延续、发展与深入     

Simulation-based risk assessment of contaminated sites under remediation scenarios, planning periods, and land-use patterns—a Canadian case study

Risk assessment of contaminated sites is crucial for quantifying adverse impacts on human health and the environment. It also provides effective decision support for remediation and management of such sites. This study presents an integrated approach for environmental and health risk assessment of subsurface contamination through the incorporation of a multiphase multicomponent modeling system within a general risk assessment framework. The method is applied to a petroleum-contaminated site in western Canada. Three remediation scenarios with different efficiencies (0, 60, and 90%) and planning periods (10, 20, 40, 60, and 80 years later) are examined for each of the five potential land-use plans of the study site. Then three risky zones with different temporal and spatial distributions are identified based on the local environmental guidelines and the excess lifetime cancer risk criteria. The obtained results are useful for assessing potential human health effects when the groundwater is used for drinking water supply. They are also critical for evaluating environmental impacts when the groundwater is used for irrigation, stockbreeding, fish culture, or when the site remains the status quo. Moreover, the results indicate that the proposed method can effectively identify risky zones with different risk levels under various remediation actions, planning periods, and land-use patterns.     

Closed‐form aftershock reliability of damage‐cumulating elastic‐perfectly‐plastic systems

Major earthquakes (i.e., mainshocks) typically trigger a sequence of lower magnitude events clustered both in time and space. Recent advances of seismic hazard analysis stochastically model aftershock occurrence (given the main event) as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process with rate that decays in time as a negative power law. Risk management in the post‐event emergency phase has to deal with this short‐term seismicity. In fact, because the structural systems of interest might have suffered some damage in the mainshock, possibly worsened by damaging aftershocks, the failure risk may be large until the intensity of the sequence reduces or the structure is repaired. At the state‐of‐the‐art, the quantitative assessment of aftershock risk is aimed at building tagging, that is, to regulate occupancy. The study, on the basis of age‐dependent stochastic processes, derived closed‐form approximations for the aftershock reliability of simple nonevolutionary elastic‐perfectly‐plastic damage‐cumulating systems, conditional on different information about the structure. Results show that, in the case hypotheses apply, the developed models may represent a basis for handy tools enabling risk‐informed tagging by stakeholders and decision makers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organochlorines and dioxin-like compounds in green-lipped mussels Perna viridis from Hong Kong mariculture zones

Concentrations of persistent organic pollutants including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine (OC) pesticides and dioxin-like compounds were measured in green-lipped mussels, Perna viridis, collected from seven mariculture zones in Hong Kong between September and October in 2002 in order to evaluate the status, spatial distribution and potential sources of pollution in these areas. Concentrations ranged from 300 to 4400 ng/g lipid weight for total OCs and 170–1000 ng/g lipid weight for total PCBs (based on 28 congeners). Relatively smaller DDT concentrations in mussels compared with previous studies suggest reduced discharges of DDTs from nearby regions into Hong Kong waters. Detection of a mixture of HCH isomers in the mussels indicated that Hong Kong waters were predominantly contaminated by technical HCHs rather than lindane. Mussel samples from all sampling locations elicited significant dioxin-like activity in the H4IIE-luc bioassay. The greatest magnitude of dioxin-like response (39 pg TEQ/g wet wt.) was detected in mussels from Ma Wan in the western waters of Hong Kong, which is strongly influenced by the Pearl River discharge. Human health risk assessment was undertaken to evaluate potential risks associated with the consumption of the green-lipped mussels. Risk quotient (RQ) for dioxin-like compounds was greater than unity suggesting that adverse health effects may be associated with high mussel consumption.     

Organochlorines and dioxin-like compounds in green-lipped mussels Perna viridis from Hong Kong mariculture zones

Concentrations of persistent organic pollutants including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine (OC) pesticides and dioxin-like compounds were measured in green-lipped mussels, Perna viridis, collected from seven mariculture zones in Hong Kong between September and October in 2002 in order to evaluate the status, spatial distribution and potential sources of pollution in these areas. Concentrations ranged from 300 to 4400 ng/g lipid weight for total OCs and 170–1000 ng/g lipid weight for total PCBs (based on 28 congeners). Relatively smaller DDT concentrations in mussels compared with previous studies suggest reduced discharges of DDTs from nearby regions into Hong Kong waters. Detection of a mixture of HCH isomers in the mussels indicated that Hong Kong waters were predominantly contaminated by technical HCHs rather than lindane. Mussel samples from all sampling locations elicited significant dioxin-like activity in the H4IIE-luc bioassay. The greatest magnitude of dioxin-like response (39 pg TEQ/g wet wt.) was detected in mussels from Ma Wan in the western waters of Hong Kong, which is strongly influenced by the Pearl River discharge. Human health risk assessment was undertaken to evaluate potential risks associated with the consumption of the green-lipped mussels. Risk quotient (RQ) for dioxin-like compounds was greater than unity suggesting that adverse health effects may be associated with high mussel consumption.     

Determination of the health of Lunyangwa wetland using Wetland Classification and Risk Assessment Index

Wetlands are major sources of various ecological goods and services including storage and distribution of water in space and time which help in ensuring the availability of surface and groundwater throughout the year. However, there still remains a poor understanding of the range of values of water quality parameters that occur in wetlands either in its impacted state or under natural conditions. It was thus imperative to determine the health of Lunyangwa wetland in Mzuzu City in Malawi in order to classify and determine its state. This study used the Escom's Wetland Classification and Risk Assessment Index Field Guide to determine the overall characteristics of Lunyangwa wetland and to calculate its combined Wetland Index Score. Data on site information, field measurements (i.e. EC, pH, temperature and DO) and physical characteristics of Lunyangwa wetland were collected from March, 2013 to February, 2014. Results indicate that Lunyangwa wetland is a largely open water zone which is dominated by free-floating plants on the water surface, beneath surface and emergent in substrate. Furthermore, the wetland can be classified as of a C ecological category (score = 60–80%), which has been moderately modified with moderate risks of the losses and changes occurring in the natural habitat and biota in the wetland. It was observed that the moderate modification and risk were largely because of industrial, agricultural, urban/social catchment stressors on the wetland. This study recommends an integrated and sustainable management approach coupled with continuous monitoring and evaluation of the health of the wetland for all stakeholders in Mzuzu City. This would help to maintain the health of Lunyangwa wetland which is currently at risk of being further modified due to the identified catchment stressors.     

Assessing risk perception and behavioral responses to influenza epidemics: linking information theory to probabilistic risk modeling

Risk perception plays a crucial role in shaping health-related behaviors in a variety of infectious disease control settings. The purpose of this study was to assess risk perception and behavioral changes in response to influenza epidemics. We present a risk perception assessment model that uses information theory linking with a probabilistic risk model to investigate the interplay between risk perception spread and health behavioral changes for an influenza outbreak. Building on human influenza data, we predicted risk perception spread as the amount of risk information. A negative feedback-based information model was used to explore whether health behavioral changes can increase the control effectiveness. Finally, a probabilistic risk assessment framework was used to predict influenza infection risk based on maximal information-derived risk perception. We found that (i) an individual who perceived more accurate knowledge of influenza can substantially increase the amount of mutual risk perception information, (ii) an intervening network over which individuals communicate overlap can be more effective in risk perception transfer, (iii) collective individual responses can increase risk perception information transferred, but may be limited by contact numbers of infectious individuals, and (iv) higher mutual risk perception information gains lower infection risk probability. We also revealed that when people increased information about the benefits of vaccination and antiviral drug used, future infections could significantly be prevented. We suggest that increasing mutual risk perception information through a negative feedback mechanism plays an important role in adaptation and mitigation behavior and policy support.