Risk is the possibility of something bad happening. People use
the word risk when they are actually talking about probability;
it means, they want to say how likely something is to happen.
People often take risks. This means that they do something that
is risky, i.e. that might be dangerous. There is a possibility
that something bad might happen. In epidemiology, risk is
defined as the number of events divided by the number of people
prone to that event. For example, if the risk of neonatal death
in a population is reported as 1/1000, it means that from each
1000 babies born, 1 is likely to die. Risk is different from
prevalence. Prevalence refers to the number of people with a
disease in a population, while risk means the number of new
cases, divided by the number of people who could possibly become
a case (for example, those who had a chance to be exposed to the
disease). A risk assessment is a list of things that could go
wrong. In many Western countries, when teachers take children on
an outing they may h