Before looking to the future, it will be useful to look back at some issues related to risk assessment and management that have so far been ignored. The issues are not so much technical as they are social and political, and to ignore them completely could leave the misleading impression that all the scientific and policy questions we have discussed are interesting matters for scholarly debate, and not much else. We shall not make this mistake.

Risk assessments reveal public health problems, of greater or lesser magnitude. If a problem is uncovered, we cannot simply hide it (at least not easily); we need to do something to reduce or eliminate it. Somebody will have to pay, no two ways about it. Depending upon the problem, costs could be massive for society as a whole, massive for selected industries, or, at the other extreme, relatively small all round. The latter generally raises only a little smoke, but when costs are heavy, things burst into flames. Because the industries that must bear the cost do not wish to be seen as destroyers of the public health or the environment, some tend to begin by determining whether there are credible ways to attack the scientific quality and accuracy of the risk assessments regulators are relying upon. They may claim risks have been exaggerated, that there is no, or only a minor public health problem.