Module 3: Toxicology - Section 7: Hazard and Risk Communication
TOX 7.1: Overview
 

OBJECTIVES

By the end of the module you should be familiar with:

  1. Background information on public health risk communication assumptions and practices ;
  2. Insights and practical skills on communicating relevant toxicological information to a lay audience.

ACTIVITIES:

  1. The lecture covers the main principles. Revise these notes.
  2. Try to answer the questions posed in the lecture before looking at the answers.

EXERCISES:

To design a risk communication tool for workers in a chemical factory. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage you to think about the complexity behind communicating risk information (e.g., chemical toxicological hazards) to semi-literate and illiterate populations. What information is important on the MSDS to protect the worker from hazardous chemical exposures? Through what means can you best communicate this information? How can you ensure that your target group will understand this information in order to have the appropriate precautionary behaviours when working with or exposed to hazardous chemicals?

This will be a group exercise. Groups will present their risk communication tool to the class for discussion.

REFERENCES:

  1. Risk Communication and Government: Theory and Application for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) - Chapter 2: Theoretical Aspects of Risk Communication. http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/corpaffr/publications/riscomm/riscomm_ch2e.shtml
  2. Issue on Risk Communication: British medical Journal: 27 September 2003 (Volume 327, Issue 7417). http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/content/vol327/issue7417/.
  3. Bennet P. Communicating about risk to public health: Pointers to good practise.
  4. The Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory Oxford University: How to interpret MSDS information. http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/interpretingmsds.html.



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Postgraduate Diploma in Occupational Health (DOH) - Modules 3: Occupational Medicine & Toxicology (Basic) by Profs Mohamed Jeebhay and Rodney Ehrlich, Health Sciences UCT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. Major contributors: Mohamed Jeebhay, Rodney Ehrlich, Jonny Myers, Leslie London, Sophie Kisting, Rajen Naidoo, Saloshni Naidoo. Source available from here. For any updates to the material, or more permissions beyond the scope of this license, please email healthoer@uct.ac.za or visit www.healthedu.uct.ac.za. Last updated Jan 2007.
Disclaimer note: Some resources and descriptions may be out-dated. For suggested updates and feedback, please contact healthoer@uct.ac.za.