Ann. occup. Hyg., Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 89, 2003
© 2003 British Occupational Hygiene Society
Published by Oxford University Press
Letters to the Editor |
Who Qualifies to be an Expert?
Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80176, 3508 TD Utrecht, The Netherlands Tel: +31-(0)30 253 9440; fax: +31-(0)30 253 9499; e-mail: h.kromhout@iras.uu.nl
Received 29 July 2002;
Wild et al. (2002) recently presented an intriguing method for combining expert rating with exposure measurements, which is similar to that recently discussed in this journal (Ramachandran, 2001; Burstyn and Kromhout, 2002). We hope that such a formalization of discussions on the application of Bayesian methods to occupational exposure assessment will lead to important advances in the field. An important ingredient missing from the discussion so far seems to be the consideration of who qualifies to be an expert assessor in the proposed exposure assessment schemes. The idea that experts should be ignorant of exposure measurements (Wild et al., 2002, p. 485) seems odd. How can experts claim to have some knowledge of the industry if they have not been able to observe the impact of the determinants of exposure on exposure levels? What other knowledge can make a person suitable for the task of exposure assessor? In most large-scale exposure assessments carried out by experts, assessors have been given access to exposure levels, and without such data it is unlikely that these experts would have been able to do their job (Kauppinen et al., 2002). Given the poor agreement between exposure assessors even in the presence of exposure measurements (Post et al., 1991; Kauppinen et al., 2002), and with poor reproducibility of exposure assessments by experts in general (Goldberg et al., 1986; Kromhout et al., 1987; Macaluso et al., 1993; Benke et al., 1997; Rybicki et al., 1997, 1998; Stewart et al., 2000), is an expert deprived of access to exposure measurements any better than random allocation of groups of workers to ranks of exposure?
Note: Wild et al. (2002) incorrectly quote Kromhout et al. (1994), when in fact they refer to Kromhout et al. (1993).
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