Interpret Health Impacts
The activity that follows prediction of health impacts is that of their evaluation or interpretation. For many health impacts, appropriate standards do not exist for determining whether the predicted effects are acceptable or not. In the context of the EIA process the evaluation of health impacts can be performed by taking into consideration several factors, including regulatory criteria, institutional information that might be relevant to the health effects or health impact-causing agents being considered, the repercussions of the health effects at the individual and populational levels, the evidence that the health effect occurs in humans, the level of confidence in the quantitative and qualitative information used to estimate dose-response relationships, the level of confidence in the exposure estimates, and finally, the public perceptions related to the health effects.