This study is a replication and extension in Canada of a previous study in the United States in which toxicologists and members of the public were surveyed to determine their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions regarding risks from chemicals. This study of "intuitive vs. scientific showed that Canadian toxicologists had far lower perceptions of risk and more favorable attitudes toward chemicals than did the Canadian public. The public's attitudes were quite negative and showed the same lack of dose-response sensitivity found in the earlier U.S. study. Both the public and the toxicologists lacked confidence in the value of animal studies for predicting human health risks. However, the public had great confidence in the validity of animal studies that found evidence of carcinogenicity, whereas such evidence was not considered highly predictive of human health risk by many toxicologists. Technical judgments of toxicologists were found to be associated with factors such as affiliation, gender, and worldviews. Implications of these data for risk communication are briefly discussed.

A national survey of 1500 Canadians was carried out to assess public perception of health risks. Questionnaire items focussed on ratings of perceived risk, sources of information on health risks and responsibility for risk management, attitude and opinions about risk, and risk taking and risk-avoiding behaviors in which the respondent has engaged. Respondents cited the news media as their most common source of information on health risks, but expressed most confidence in risk information provided by the medical profession. Respondents assigned risk management responsibility to many groups and organizations, but perceived medical doctors and Health and Welfare Canada as doing the best job of fulfilling their responsibilities. The Canadian public reported a high degree of perceived risk for many hazards, and were particularly sensitive to lifestyle risks such as cigarette smoking, street drugs, alcohol, AIDS and suntanning that are also of concern to health professionals. Other findings included a high degree of concern about health risks associated with industrial pollution and chemical products (with the exception of medicines), a widespread belief that a risk-free environment was an achievable goal, and sizable differences in perception of risk by gender, age, education and region.

We present a nonparametric approach that tests whether multiple longitudinal measures tend in the same direction over time. It is not required that each measure have the same number of serial observations, or that the observations be evenly spaced. The test and related estimators of group differences are based on the multivariate rank test of Wei and Lachin (1) and multivariate Mann-Whitney shift estimators of Thall and Lachin (2) and Lachin (3). An example is given using a subset of exercise data from a clinical trial of vesnarinone in congestive heart failure.

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