Lognormal Distributions for Fish Consumption by the General U.S. Population

Betsy Ruffle, David E. Burmaster, Paul D. Anderson and Henry D. Gordon

Risk Analysis, 1994, vol. 14, issue 4, 395-404

Abstract: The rate of fish consumption is a critical variable in the assessment of human health risk from water bodies affected by chemical contamination and in the establishment of federal and state Ambient Water Quality Criteria (AWQC). For 1973 and 1974, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) analyzed data on the consumption of salt‐water finfish, shellfish, and freshwater finfish from all sources in 10 regions of the United States for three age groups in the general population: children (ages 1 through 11 years), teenagers (ages 12 through 18 years), and adults (ages 19 through 98 years). Even though the NMFS data reported in Ref. 14 are 20 years old, they remain the most complete data on the overall consumption of all fish by the general U.S. population and they have been widely used to select point values for consumption. Using three methods, we fit lognormal distributions to the results of the survey as analyzed and published in Ref. 14. Strong lognormal fits were obtained for most of the 90 separate data sets. These results cannot necessarily be used to model the consumption of fish by sport or subsistence anglers from specific sites or from single water bodies.

Date: 1994
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1994.tb00258.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:14:y:1994:i:4:p:395-404

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Risk Analysis from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().