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Purpose – New genetically modified (GM) crops are novel but risky interventions, offering a variety of potential benefits but also the possibility of serious unintended consequences. I address the regulatory framework for GM crops, seeking protection from disproportionate risks without unduly stifling innovation.

Approach – Conditions that may justify precautionary interventions are identified, and an idealized regulatory protocol (screening, pre-release testing, and post-release surveillance, STS) is developed to provide protection, encourage research and learning, and focus-in quickly on the cases that pose serious threats of harm. This protocol is adapted to the case of GM crops, and compared with current regulatory practice in the United States, the EU, and Canada, as well as international agreements exemplified by the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Two real-world cases are considered, Starlink® corn and Roundup-Ready® canola, and some speculations are offered as to how the stylized protocol might have handled them.

Findings for policy – Pre-release, US regulatory practice is more fragmented and incomplete than the stylized protocol; EU practice is more systematic and streamlined, but some critics perceive over-regulation; and Canadian regulatory practice is more consistent with the protocol. Only the EU performs systematic post-release surveillance. International agreements have various weaknesses, beginning with fragmentation: for example, food safety and biosafety are regulated separately.

Implications for further research – Embracing the STS framework opens a broad new avenue of research about to how the mix of pre-release testing and post-release surveillance might be streamlined to provide adequate protection while reducing further the costs and delays entailed.

Purpose: While COVID-19 has upended lives, it has also catalyzed innovation with potential to advance health delivery. Yet, we know little about how the delivery system, and primary care in particular, has responded and how this has impacted vulnerable patients. We aimed to understand the impact of COVID-19 on primary care practice sites and their vulnerable patients and to identify explanations for variation. Approach: We developed and administered a survey to practice managers and physician leaders from 173 primary care practice sites, October-November 2020. We report and graphically depict results from univariate analysis and examine potential explanations for variation in practices' process innovations in response to COVID-19 by assessing bivariate relationships between seven dependent variables and four independent variables. Findings: Among 96 (55.5%) respondents, primary care practice sites on average took more safety (8.5 of 12) than financial (2.5 of 17) precautions in response to COVID-19. Practice sites varied in their efforts to protect patients with vulnerabilities, providing care initially postponed, and experience with virtual visits. Financial risk, practice size, practitioner age, and emergency preparedness explained variation in primary care practices' process innovations. Many practice sites plan to sustain virtual visits, dependent mostly on patient and provider preference and continued reimbursement. Value: While findings indicate rapid and substantial innovation, conditions must enable primary care practice sites to build on and sustain innovations, to support care for vulnerable populations, including those with multiple chronic conditions and socio-economic barriers to health, and to prepare primary care for future emergencies.

Introduction: Contrary to the past when we used to pick among destinations based on our personal preferences, we have had to ignore our preferences due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tourists’ buying behaviour and patterns may differ in the pandemic conditions.

Purpose: During the early pandemic period, filled with panic and fear, consumers shopped for pasta and toilet paper so much so that stores ran out of these consumables, and people started a fight for survival. It was extremely difficult to answer the question of when these consumers, who were shopping as if they would never get out of their homes ever again, would go on vacation as tourists again. In this chapter, it is aimed to reveal how much tourists’ choices of destination affect the number of cases and deaths caused by the pandemic.

Methodology: To understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourist destination choices, correlations between the numbers of cases and deaths in 2020 and the changes in tourist arrival numbers for the previous year were analysed.

Findings: Based on the results of the analyses, consumers generally want to participate in tourism even in pandemic conditions. Therefore, at the end of the chapter, precautions and recommendations are put forward to adapt to the pandemic process and enable the dynamism in the tourism sector to be maintained.

As a key component of the American health care system, the physician office could be the front line in a bioterrorist attack. Nationally and locally, the primary focus on this subject appears to be from a hospital preparedness and public health agency perspective, with little attention devoted to primary physician providers in their own offices, and those specialists to whom patients may be referred. While unrelated to bioterrorism, the recent SARS outbreak also brings to the forefront the need for physicians offices to be able to clinically, operationally, and managerially respond to illnesses that mirror the symptoms of known illnesses, but may be more virulent new organisms or hybrids of existing organisms. If the face of bioterrorism is subtle and slow in its presentation, physicians, in their own offices, could be the first providers of care. Will they be prepared, or will they be among the first fatalities in a bioterrorist attack?

Strong versions of the Precautionary Principle (PP) require regulators to prohibit or impose technology controls on activities that pose uncertain risks of possibly significant environmental harm. This decision rule is conceptually unsound and would diminish social welfare. Uncertainty as such does not justify regulatory precaution. While they should reject PP, regulators should take appropriate account of societal aversion to risks of large harm and the value of obtaining additional information before allowing environmentally risky activities to proceed.

The Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa resulted in negative effects with high infection rates, health care shortages, increases in death rates, plus a collapsing economy. There was an urgent need for precautionary health promotional campaigns to educate populations about the virus. However, with South Africa’s diverse population cultural beliefs, socio-cultural aspects needed to be catered for. Health literacy also had to be considered for effective positive behaviour change patterns to occur. Social barriers such as misinformation, stigma, myths, anxiety and prejudice resulted into infodemics emerging in the population. Media representation about the pandemic needed to ensure truthful and authentic information reached target audiences. Specific examples related to religious beliefs (the Chief Justice Mogeng Mogeng) and cultural remedies (Madagascar’s artemisia or “green gold”) are included in this chapter, to elaborate examples of such cases in South Africa, with no audience engagement analysed. Two health promotional campaigns, Count Me In and We will beat this are analysed via a qualitative multimodal analysis. Behaviour change communication theories are included to triangulate and validate the findings. Findings indicated that health campaigns need to cater for socio-cultural diversities and be audience specific in order for adequate behaviour change to occur, via clear health messages.

It is well established that courts should and in fact do require a higher level of care by people working within their profession than by amateurs. Adequate care is simply more within reach for the professional than for the amateur (less ‘costly’). This article analyzes whether a further distinction between the professional and the amateur should influence the way courts set negligence standards: the professional is more likely to invest in acquiring information concerning negligence standards, and the professional is hence more likely than the amateur to be influenced by the standards. This issue is analyzed for the case where the professional is the injurer and the amateur is the victim. The amateur is assumed not to acquire any information concerning standards, and the behavior of the amateur is taken as exogenously fixed. Under this assumption, the negligence standard applied to the professional may be either higher or lower than first best, depending on whether care levels by the injurer and the victim are substitutes or complements and on whether, in the absence of information, the amateur over- or under-estimates the standard applied to him or her.

Globalization has affected science inevitably with a motto of ‘Knowledge conquers the mind’. However, global efforts and harmonization are needed and are established through international rules, laws, norms and standards. The potentially positive and negative results of globalization have altered the production relations and complicated the demographic scale.

Purpose: Risk is a multifaceted concept, and its identification requires complex approaches that are often misunderstood. The consequence is that decisions are based on limited perception rather than the full value and meaning of what risk is, as a result, the way it is being tackled is incorrect. The individuals are often limited in their perceptions and ideas and do not embrace the full multifaceted nature of risk. Regulators and individuals want to follow norms and checklists or overuse models, simulations, and templates, thereby reducing responsibility for decision-making. At the same time, the wider use of technology and rules reduces the critical thinking of individuals. We advance the automation process by building robots that follow protocols and forget about the part of risk assessment that cannot be programed. Therefore, with this study, the objective of this study was to discover how people define risk, the influencing factors of risk perception and how they behave toward this perception. The authors also determine how the perception differed with age, gender, marital status, education level and region. The novelty of the research is related to individual risk perception during COVID-19, as this is a new and unknown phenomenon. Methodology: The research is based on the analysis of the self-administered purposely designed questionnaires we distributed across different social media platforms between February and June 2020 in Europe and in some cases was carried out as a interview over communication platforms such as “Skype,” “Zoom” and “Microsoft Teams.” The questionnaire was divided into four parts: Section 1 was designed to collect demographic information from the participants; Section 2 included risk definition statements obtained from literature and a preliminary discussion with peers; Section 3 included risk behavior statements; and Section 4 included statements on risk perception experiences. A five-point Likert Scale was provided, and participants were required to answer along a scale of “1” for “Strongly Agree” to “5” for “Strongly Disagree.” Participants also had the option to elaborate further and provide additional comments in an open-ended box provided at the end of the section. 466 valid responses were received. Thematic analysis was carried out to analyze the interviews and the open-ended questions, while the questionnaire responses were analyzed using various quantitative methods on IBM SPSS (version 23). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that individuals evaluate the risk before making a decision and view risk as both a loss and opportunity. The study identifies nine factors influencing risk perception. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that we can continue to develop models and rules, but as long as the risk is not understood, we will never achieve anything.