Tram Town
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
| Category: Risk Anyone who knows me knows that I believe we (as a western global chunk) have become way too risk averse. In truth I think we are way too imbalanced in our risk aversion. This article about the US FDA gives some perspective of two types of risk: Type I the risk of taking an action, and Type II the risk of not taking an action. Type I, at least from the FDA's perspective, is way more prominent than Type II (or that is how they have to treat it to keep Congress happy). The example of the danger of Type II risk is: These include the greater than three-year delay in the approval of misoprostol, a drug for the treatment of gastric bleeding, which is estimated to have cost between eight and fifteen thousand lives per year; and the lag in the approval of streptokinase for the treatment of occluded coronary arteries, which may have caused the loss of more than ten thousand lives per year.Read it all because it may change your perspective on risk in health and even, possibly, more broadly. |
