An assessment of the risk of chronic lung injury attributable to long-term ozone exposure

This paper presents an application of a formal process for encoding experts’ probabilistic judgments. The objective is to characterize scientific judgment regarding the risk of chronic lung injury to children aged 8 through 16 and to adult outdoor workers due to long-term ozone exposure in areas with patterns of exposure similar to those found in Southern California and the Northeast. The present measure of injury is the incidence of mild or moderate lesions in the centriacinar region of the lung. Probabilities over population response rates were elicited from six health experts actively researching ozone-induced lung injury. The authors describe the present approach, present some judgmental probability distributions over the population response rates for formation of lesions induced by exposure to ozone, summarize some qualitative results, and offer some concluding comments.