Perhaps the quintessential role of government is to protect its citizens from threats of all types: war, global warming, terrorism, disease, toxic substances. This essay provides a review and critique of Sunstein’s innovative contribution to the lively debate over how government should perform this role, a debate that often pits cost-benefit analysis against the precautionary principle. The aut...

Applying the Precautionary Principle to public health requires a re-evaluation of the methods of inference currently used to make claims about disease causation from epidemiologic and other forms of scientific evidence. In current thinking, a well-established, near-certain causal relationship implies highly consistent statistically significant results across many different studies, large relati...

In its restless metamorphosis, the environmental movement captures ideas and transforms them into principles, guidelines and points of leverage. Sustainability is one such idea, now being reinterpreted in the aftermath of the 1992 Rio Conference. So too is the precautionary principle. Like sustainability, the precautionary principle is neither a well defined principle nor a stable concept. It h...

The bill bans lead and phthalates from children's products, creates a searchable database of product complaints filed with the government for consumers to access, requires manufacturers to make it easier for consumers to learn about recalled products, increases fines and other penalties for safety violations, and increases the responsibilities and budget of the federal Consumer Product Safety C...

Possible adverse health effects due to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cellular phones and base stations present a major public health issue across Europe. Because scientists cannot exclude that EMFs may cause health problems, the application of the precautionary principle is debated heavily. By considering precautionary measures, political decision makers hope to cope with public fears abou...

BACKGROUND No health hazard has been established from exposure to radiofrequency fields up to the levels recommended by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. However, in response to public concern and the perceived level of scientific uncertainty, there are continuing calls for the application of the precautionary principle to radiofrequency exposures from mobile ph...