• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.675-685
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• 2010

This study analyzed risk perception and risk reduction behaviors of male and female college students in their twenties who purchased fashion products in internet shopping malls. It also investigated the relationship between risk perception and risk reduction behavior as well as the ways in which groups, categorized by risk perception, differed in their risk reduction behaviors. The results of this study were as follows: first, seven factors of risk perception were identified. These were product quality, shipping, product image, payment, economic feasibility, fear of other people's reactions, and size. Six types of risk reduction behavior were also identified. These were product comparison, word-of-mouth information search, price search, preference for name-brand, service comparison, and referring to experiences. Next, a correlational analysis of the factors of risk perception and those of risk reduction behavior showed several patterns. The highest positive correlation was between economic risk perception and product comparison behavior. In addition, shipping risk perception was positively correlated with service comparison behavior and product quality and product image had a positive correlation with word-of-mouth information search behavior. Third, customers of internet shopping malls could be categorized into three groups: shipping risk perception group, high risk perception group, and product quality risk perception group. The groups were shown by factor analysis to be significantly different to each other. Finally, risk reduction behavior was investigated according to the different groups of risk perception of the internet shopping malls and the results showed significant differences among groups.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.175-187
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• 1999

To investigate the risk perception of environmental issues, two consequtive surveys were conducted to environmental professionals using a standardized questionnaire from September to October in 1999. The number of subjects were 72 for the first survey and 68 for the second one. The questionnaire was consisted of items such as the degree of environmental pollution in Korea, risk perception of some issues on human health and ecosystem, and seriousness of the problems in the real situation in Korea. For the degree of environmental pollution in Korea, the average risk rating in the second test (7.4 point) was significantly higher than that in the first test (7.2 point). The risk perception on the general human health and ecosystem, and the seriousness in Korea situation were analyzed in the order of ′air pollution′, ′water pollution′,′soil contamination′,′waste′,′toxic chemical pollutants′,′food contamination′,′ocean contamination′, ′odor pollution′, and ′noise pollution′. Also ′toxic chemical pollutants′ problem was perceived to be the highest risk on general human health or ecosystem, and on present situation in Korea. ′Automotive vehicle exhaust′ problem was perceived to be the most severe environmental problems among specific 30 items. ′Industrial source air pollution′,′toxic air pollutants′, and ′domestic and industrial source pollutants to surface water′ were relatively severe environmental problems comparing to other problems. The pollution issues were classified into four categories by two aspects of perception; risk in general setting and seriousness in Korea situation. If the issues were highly serious in Korea and low risk perception in general setting then it is named "the Korea-specific group". Those that were all high score in two aspects, named "the Common group". Those that were all low in two aspects, named "the Nonsignificant group". And the issues were high risk perception in general setting and low seriousness in Korean situation, named "the Latent group".

• Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.47-60
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• 1996

Nitrate contamination problems from groundwater supplies have been reported throughout many countries in the world, including Korea. Nitrate salts can induce methemoglobinemia and possibly human gastric cancer. To reduce human health risk from nitrate in groundwater supplies, several nitrate risk-management strategies can be developed based on the acceptable level of human health risk, the reasonableness of nitrate-control cost, and the technical feasibility of nitrate-control methods. However, due to a lack of available information, assessing risk, cost and technical feasibility contains elements of uncertainty. In the present paper, a nitrate risk-management methodology using fuzzy sets in combination with a multiobjective decision-making (MODM) technique is developed to assist decision makers in evaluating, with uncertain information, various nitrate risk-management strategies in order to decide a proper strategy.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.397-406
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• 2014

Objectives: Perchloroethylene (PCE) is a volatile chemical widely used as a solvent in the dry-cleaning and textile processing industries. It was evaluated as Group 2 "probably carcinogenic to humans" by the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) of the United State Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) in 2012. In order to provide a scientific basis for establishing risk management measures for chemicals on the national priority substances list, aggregate risk assessment was conducted for PCE, included in the top-10 substances. Methods: We conducted the investigation and monitoring of PCE exposure (e.g., exposure scenario, detection levels, and exposure factors, etc.) and assessed its multi-media (e.g., outdoor air, indoor air, and ground water) exposure risk with a deterministic and probabilistic approach. Results: In human risk assessment (HRA), the level of human exposure was higher in the younger age group. The exposure level through inhalation at home was the highest among the exposure routes. Outdoor air or uptake of drinking water represented less than 1% of total contributions to PCE exposure. These findings suggested that the level of risk was negligible since the Hazard Index (HI) induced by HRA was below one among all age groups, with a maximum HI value of 0.17 when reasonable maximum exposure was applied. Conclusion: In conclusion, it was suggested that despite low exposure risk, further studies are needed considering main sources, including occupational exposure.

• Journal of Dairy Science and Biotechnology
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.69-73
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• 2011

Food borne pathogens are a growing concern for human health and food safety throughout the world. Milk and dairy products are commonly associated with spoilage or contamination from a wide variety of physical, microbial, and chemical hazardous. Microbiological risk analysis consists of three components: risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication, and overall objective of this process is ultimately public health protection. The microbiological risk assessment is useful tool to evaluate food safety as it is based on a scientific approach. In addition risk assessment process includes quantitative estimation of the probability of occurrence of microbial hazards to evaluate more accurate human exposure. The aim of this study is to review the microbiological risk assessment on the prevalence of bacterial foodborne pathogens in milk and dairy products.

• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.691-702
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• 2015

This study examined the levels of risk perception of food risk elements by adopting a psychometric paradigm and analyzed factors affecting concerns about food risk elements to obtain basic materials for food safety policy. The data were collected from 296 housewives in Daegu, Korea, by a self-administered questionnaire. Frequency distributions, Pearson's correlation coefficient analysis, factor analysis, Cronbach's ${alpha}$, and multiple regression analyses were conducted by SPSS 21.0. The mean level of concern for food safety was 3.75/5.00 points, and the mean percentage of correct answers about heavy metal contamination was highest among food risk elements. The respondents perceived radioactive contaminated foods, GM foods, and endocrine disruptors as a new, delayed, scientifically unknown, involuntary, serious, and uncontrollable risk in risk perception. According to the result of factor analysis for risk perception, two factors such as non-controllability and dread were categorized. In the risk perception map, radioactive contaminated foods and GM foods were considered as an uncontrollable and dreaded risk, heavy metal contamination, endocrine disruptors, and pesticide residues as a controllable and dreaded risk, and foodborne illness and food additives as a controllable and less dreaded risk. On the other hand, the levels of concerns about food risk elements were higher in order of radioactive contaminated foods, GM foods, and endocrine disruptors. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that age, concern for food safety, percentage of correct answers about food risk elements, non-controllability, and dread influenced the concerns about food risk elements. These results imply that food safety policies should consider differences in consumer's risk perception of food risk elements.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.203-216
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• 1999

This paper describes a set of multi-pathway models for estimating health risk to lead. The models link concentrations of an environmental contaminant (lead) in air, water and food to human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and dietary routes. Exposure is used as the foundation for predicting risk of health detriment within the population. The process of estimating exposure using often limited data and extrapolating to a large diverse population requires many assumption, inferences, and simplification. This paper is divided into four section. The first section provides lead contaminant levels on obtaining environmental concentration of air, tap water, and foods. The second section provides a discussion of exposure parameters and uncertainty associated predicting human health risk of contaminants. The third and fourth section illustrate lifetime average daily exposure (LADE) and excess cancer risk (ECR) based on exposure parameters. The relationship between concentration of lead in an environmental medium and human exposure is determined with pathway exposure factors (PEFs). The calculation of LADE and ECR is carried out using Monte-Carlo simulation with probability density function of exposure parameters. Examination of the result reveals that, for lead exposure, ingestion (food) is the dominant route of exposure rather than inhalation (air), and ingestion (tap eater).

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.4167-4175
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• 2013

A najor current challenge and constraint in cervical cancer research is the development of vaccines against human papilloma virus (HPV) epitopes. Although many studies are done on epitope identification on HPVs, no computational work has been carried out for high risk forms which are considered to cause cervical cancer. Of all the high risk HPVs, HPV 16, HPV 18 and HPV 45 are responsible for 94% of cervical cancers in women worldwide. In this work, we computationally predicted the promiscuous epitopes among the E6 proteins of high risk HPVs. We identified the conserved residues, HLA class I, HLA class II and B-cell epitopes along with their corresponding secondary structure conformations. We used extremely precise bioinformatics tools like ClustalW2, MAPPP, NetMHC, Epi,Jen, EpiTop 1.0, ABCpred, BCpred and PSIPred for achieving this task. Our study identified specific regions 'FAFR(K)DL' followed by 'KLPD(Q)LCTEL' fragments which proved to be promiscuous epitopes present in both human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I, class II molecules and B cells as well. These fragments also follow every suitable character to be considered as promiscuous epitopes with supporting evidences of previously reported experimental results. Thus, we conclude that these regions should be considered as the important for design of specific therapeutic vaccines for cervical cancer.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.592-597
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• 2008

Current water quality standard (WQS) in Korea is based on the protection of human health, not considering the protection of aquatic organisms. Most of chemicals can be toxic to ecological biota as well as human. Health of aquatic biota is closely related to the human health via food chain, therefore ecological risk based-WQS needs to be developed to protect the aquatic ecosystem. In this study, we selected the 31 chemicals in the Project entitled 'Development of integrated methodology for evaluation of water environment'. The methodology for calculating water quality criteria was derived from the Australian and New Zealand processes for deriving guideline trigger value for aquatic ecosystem. The available ecotoxicity data were collected from US EPA's ECOTOXicology Database (ECOTOX), TOX-2000 Database, European Chemicals Bureau (ECB)'s International Uniform Chemical Information Database (IUCLID) and Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA)'s report 'Ambient Water Quality Criteria (AWQC)'. The aquatic toxicity data for the Korean species were selected for risk assessment to reflect the Korean water environment. The monitoring values were calculated from the water quality monitoring data four main Korean rivers. We suggested the order of priorities of chemicals based on ecological risk assessment. We expect that these results can be useful information for establishing the WQS for the protection of aquatic ecosystem.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.26-31
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• 2011

The genotypes of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) are important in the carcinogenesis of uterine cervical cancer. Diagnosis of uterine cervical cancer screening has been executed using Papanicolau method (Pap) and HPV DNA Chip method. We researched the interrelation of HPV DNA genotypes in single and multiple infections and analyzed the results of Pap and HPV DNA Chip tests at Gunsan Medical Center (GMC). The correlation analysis was surveyed on collected results from 599 patients who have been tested with both Pap and HPV DNA chip tests from November 2004 to May 2010 at GMC. The inconsistency between Pap and HPV DNA Chip tests was 41.1%. The HPV DNA Chip genotype related with high risk cases were type 16 (13.5%), type 52 (10.5%), type 58 (10.1%), and type 18 (3.4%). Those related with low risk cases were type 70 (8.9%), type 6 (1.7%), type 40 (1.2%), type 11 (1.3%), and other types (14.3%). Among the 195 cases of HPV positive status, 161 cases were associated with single infection; 108 (67.1%) cases were related with high risk genotype; 19 (11.8%) cases were low risk genotype; 31 (21.1%) cases were related with other types. 29 cases were associated with double infections; 23 (79.3%) cases were high risks; 5 (17.2%) cases were mixed high and low risks; 1 (3.5%) case was low risk.