 What is health risk? Last week, risk bites took a 30,000-foot view of what is meant by risk. This week, I'm looking more specifically at what this means for health risk. To recap, things that are important to us have worth. Bad stuff happens, and that worth is diminished. We can reduce this loss of worth or its impacts through avoidance, insurance or adaptation. Health risk is a number that indicates the probability of a specific loss of worth occurring, and it's important for deciding how to handle the bad stuff and protect worth. Well, so much for generalities. How does this relate to health risk? Here, the worth we are talking about is our health and wellbeing, and that are the people around us. That bad stuff is all the things that can adversely affect our health, the environment we live in, the stuff we're exposed to, the ability of our bodies to handle it. And the loss of worth is the impact on our health, whether it's as mild as a sore throat or as devastating as a terminal illness. To minimise this loss of worth, we need to know what contributes to ill health, how big an effect we're looking at, and how best to intervene. And this is where understanding health risk, that number that indicates the probability of a specific health impact occurring, is so important. However, calculating health risk is not easy. To come up with a number, we need to understand the innate potential of things to cause harm, as well as how much of them causes what specific harm. We also need to understand how exposure to different agents affects people across their lives and how they react differently to the things they come into contact with. RiskBytes will be looking at the basics of estimating health risk next week and will be delving further into the specifics of risk assessment over the coming months. So stay tuned and don't forget to subscribe.