It’s a daunting task to comb through scientific and medical literature to identify emerging potential risks that could ultimately drive up liability insurance claims while separating out the risk myths—popular theories of potential liability, which are actually risk myths that are less likely to hold up in court.

Praedicat, a Los Angeles-based InsurTech analytics firm, takes on the challenge, using algorithms that scan more than 30 million scientific journal articles—a number that grows every day. “Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are rapidly refreshing our data to capture new articles and identify new risks,” the company says on its website.

The accompanying article authored by Praedicat executives Robert Reville and Adam Grossman is the third in a series of regular articles that Praedicat’s people will author expressly for Carrier Management, alerting the casualty insurance community to areas of concern and areas where potentially insurable risks lie beneath hyped theories linking products to human harm.

The first article in the series, “Risks and Non-Risks in the Obesity Epidemic,” was published in the March/April edition of Carrier Management and on our website under the title “Are Building Materials Making Us Fat?”

The second article in the series, “Risk and Non-Risks: Exploring Autism’s Environmental Drivers,” was published in the May/June edition of Carrier Management and on our website under the title “Underwriting by Google’ Leads to Wrong Answers on Autism Drivers.”