Reporting environmental cancer risks

This thesis was written with the idea in mind of preparing a "how-to" guide for newspaper journalists who must write about scientific information. Therefore, several portions of the thesis (the final sections of Chapters 3, 4 and 5) offer specific suggestions and instructions for reporting cancer risk information, i.e. how—to translate cancer risk numbers into lay-langauage. Other sections of the thesis present 1) a general overveiw of cancer risk research (Chapter 3) , and 2) two academic investigations that substantiate the need for better cancer risk communication (the opening sections of Chapters 4 and 5)