Speakers discussed communicating risks to children?s health at event

Parents concerned about the health and well-being of their children face a confusing picture: some risks to children are over-hyped in the media, while others may be virtually ignored. To address the problem, Kimberly Thompson, HSPH associate professor of risk analysis and decision science, launched the Kids Risk Project in 2000 to investigate the real risks children face. At a daylong Kids Risk symposium on July 30 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center, Thompson and other researchers shared recent lessons about children's health and safety and the challenges of communicating information to the public.

Thompson provided an overview of current risks that children face. For instance, access to food, clothing, and shelter is a big concern for many of the world's children. It is also a problem for some children in the U.S., with 17 percent of American children under the age of 18 years living in families below the poverty level.  Unintended injury continues to be a major cause of death among children; infectious diseases are an ongoing health concern; and chronic diseases like diabetes are on the rise.

"We try to help people see things they aren't otherwise seeing," Thompson said.

Risk analysis can help put potential dangers into perspective, but the approach is not as simple as crunching numbers. Over the past several years, Thompson said, her work with Kids Risk has taught her several lessons. One is that variability in risk, meaning real differences between individuals, is important; an intervention that helps one population might indirectly harm another. The research that prompted her focus on children provides the perfect example. In the mid-1990s, it was found that airbags in cars that saved adult lives conversely harmed children, particularly babies placed in infant safety seats in the front seats.

Uncertainty is also an important factor in characterizing risk because it makes understanding risks more difficult, and it means that sometimes implementing the perceived best policy does not guarantee the desired outcome.

Time is also an important factor in designing and evaluating interventions to help children, who go through so many changes and experiences as they grow.

"It's very difficult for us to characterize the value of interventions on the trajectory of children's lives, but we must consider time and system dynamics explicitly in our analyses," said Thompson.

In July, Thompson and research associate Radboud Duintjer Tebbens received the Jay Wright Forrester Award from the System Dynamics Society for their modeling research related to polio eradication. The modeling takes into account the many complexities of trying to stamp out an infectious disease.

Thompson emphasized that data can mislead people, especially if they are misinterpreted in the media. Several years ago, for example, media reports sparked concern over infants dying in bath seats when in fact the real problem was that too many parents were leaving infants unattended in bathtubs.

Communicating risks is difficult in today's media environment, where information, especially on the web, can be biased or uninformed. A key challenge, Thompson said, is to help people understand the value of interventions that reduce risks.

—Courtney Humphries. Photo by Suzanne Camarata.