The index of harm: A measure for comparing occupational risk across industries

Abstract

This paper presents an index of harm methodology that compares occupational risk among workers exposed to radiological and nonradiological harms. It extends the work of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) by considering American rather than European and Japanese industry groups, by treating the relative importance of various occupational harms as a parameter rather than an arbitrary constant, and by identifying several ways in which both the methodology and the database could be improved. In the analysis, we examine the risk affects of six occupational harms — three nonradiological (death, accidental injury, and disease or illness) and three radiological (somatic effects, genetic effects, and somatic effects to the fetuses or embryos of pregnant women). We performed our analysis under five different assumptions about the relative importance of averting of the six harms in question. The results of this analysis show that radiological workers exposed to the current industry average of 0.35 rem/year are among the safest of all industry groupings, and the riskiest industries appear to be mining; agriculture, fishing, and farming; construction; transportation; and manufacturing, roughly in that order.