An assessment of the risk of chronic lung injury attributabl

An application of a formal process for encoding experts' probabilistic judgments is presented. The objective is to characterize scientific judgment regarding the risk of chronic lung injury to children aged 8 through 16 and to adult outdoor workers due to long-term ozone exposure in areas with patterns of exposure similar to those found in Southern California and the Northeast. The measure of injury is the incidence of mild or moderate lesions in the centriacinar region of the lung. Probabilities over population response rates are elicited from 6 health experts actively researching ozone-induced lung injury. The approach is described, some judgmental probability distributions over the population response rates for formation of lesions induced by exposure to ozone are presented, some qualitative results are summarized, and some concluding comments are offered.