Phantom Dangers in the (Mis)Info Age
It’s an irony of the Information Age that at a time when more Americans have better access to larger amounts of knowledge than ever before, many are ill-informed about the true nature of the health risks we face. We need better leadership on this issue from the academic and research communities, the White House and congressional champions of science.
Because intelligent risk management is a resource-intensive process--consuming our time, emotions and money--we need to do a better job of setting priorities and ameliorating important hazards.
On a personal level, the evaluation of risk is a very subjective and fallible process. We often make lifestyle choices based on overreaction to certain risks (for example, avoiding air travel for fear of being in a plane crash), even while we underreact to even greater risks (by not wearing seat belts in autos). Yet this kind of scenario plays out time and again, when society, in the form of our mass media, courts and government, devotes an inordinate amount of resources to minute yet sensational risks, rather than more mundane but much more serious hazards.
A good example of skewed priorities is our treatment of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). We have spent significant time and resources worrying about children who are exposed to EMFs because of the proximity of their homes to power lines. However, the growing body of data now indicates that the fields from power lines are not a threat. Better investments in children’s welfare would include promoting the use of bicycle helmets, encouraging regular physical exercise and mitigating the deadly violence caused by firearms.
The confusion about risk and the distorted responses it produces can be exacerbated by a controversy-seeking news media and our litigation-prone legal system, even before the scientific community weighs in with plausible conclusions based on solid data.
For instance, the Food and Drug Administration’s 1992 moratorium on the use of silicone gel breast implants opened the floodgates to tens of thousands of lawsuits, even though the medical evidence connecting silicone to auto-immune disorders was merely anecdotal. Manufacturers and the FDA had not yet initiated large-scale studies of women with implants. Now that we have such studies, they have largely ruled out the implants as a significant cause of the immunological maladies ascribed to them. The mass media and the courts now are seeking to pursue a more balanced course, but it is difficult to stuff a loud, sensational hazard claim back into the genie’s bottle.
Contrast the costly efforts to regulate overblown risks with the hidden costs of neglected hazards. Children are far more likely to be exposed to harmful levels of toxins from lead in peeling paint than from chemicals at abandoned industrial waste sites. Yet we have a comprehensive federal program to clean up the toxins in water and soil at Superfund sites; no comparable program exists for lead paint abatement in older homes where many poorer children grow up.
The apportionment of biomedical research funding also reflects the misapprehension of risk. While injuries (from accidents such as car crashes and falls) account for the loss of nearly one in four years of life expectancy among the U.S. population, and are a larger source of economic loss due to premature death than cancer and heart disease, the federal government spends just $1 out of every $14 of its biomedical research funds on injury prevention. More than one-third is spent on heart disease research and more than half is spent on cancer.
We need not less government but a smarter government working in tandem with responsible media, industrial and scientific enterprises. We need a government that ranks risks based on science and thoughtful value judgments, and sets rational risk-reduction priorities. In the medical and scientific communities, we must do a better job of explaining our findings, acknowledging our points of uncertainty or disagreement and using readily understood analogies to place our hazard claims into broad perspective. The news media need to be mindful that anecdotal examples are not concrete evidence of major risks. Having more information from risk analysis doesn’t guarantee that we’ll behave in a more intelligent manner. But we’ll never develop reasonable priorities without clearer signals from those who develop policy initiatives (the government), those who interpret these initiatives (the news media) and those with the power to reduce danger (the business community and consumers). The real cost of making ill-informed public health decisions is the “statistical murder” of citizens who die or suffer from proven, yet neglected hazards.
