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First Person: February 19, 1997
Life's many hazards include overreacting to media scares BY JOHN STOSSEL '69 I'm embarrassed to admit it took me years of reporting scares to realize that I was doing a disservice. The turning point came when a producer rushed into my office pushing a story on cigarette lighters. "Bic lighters are exploding," he said. "They've killed four people!" But by then I had compiled a "death list," a morbid document based on fatality data from government agencies and medical groups. The list provides invaluable perspective. Once you know that more people are killed by mundane things like beds and plastic bags, or that ordinary buckets kill some 50 Americans a year (victims are mostly children who fall into them and drown), then it's harder to get hysterical about, say, Bic lighters. Risk analysts measure the costs of accidents by how much each is likely to shorten the average life. So with the help of physicist Bernard Cohen, I drew up a chart (right) of some risks the media have hyped, along with some more ordinary risks that you may not hear so much about. You'll notice that the media favorites-for example, toxic waste sites like Love Canal-are at the least-dangerous end of the chart. Hyping small risks may cause more harm than the risks themselves. People frightened about plane crashes are more likely to take the car, thus vastly increasing their risk. One big loser in this process of hyping scares is science. Unfortunately, in our love of scare stories, we in the media often find it effective to take a tiny and insignificant datum-or one sensational announcement-and run with it. This misinformation often gets picked up by legislatures and courts. The good news is that some are catching on to "junk science." Recently, a federal judge in Oregon threw out of court the plaintiffs' experts who had been peddling the unproven theory that breast implants cause a variety of maladies. But the media continue to peddle plenty of other bogus scares. Here are principles to keep in mind to avoid being misled by junk science: € Association is not causation. Science author Michael Fumento points out that if we see fat people drinking diet soda, we shouldn't conclude that diet soda causes obesity. When trying to understand less familiar phenomena, we are more likely to see patterns where there are none. Consider silicone breast implants. If you know someone who was healthy before receiving implants but developed a crippling disease after surgery, it's natural to associate these events; but as the Oregon judge recognized, that does not mean that A caused B. About 10,000 women with breast implants have developed connective tissue disease, but that's no higher than the rate among the general population. € Clusters often mean nothing. Similar events, such as people developing the same disease in the same place, often happen by chance. You can test this by repeatedly flipping a coin. Are five heads in a row big news? No, just a streak. We accept it with coins, but panic when it comes to something like cancer. Several American communities have detected cancer clusters and attributed them to, say, a nearby factory or power lines. The power lines may look menacing, but that doesn't make them the cause of any fluctuations in the rate of disease. We're all exposed to the Earth's magnetic field, and it's hundreds of times greater than the energy most people get from power lines. € Natural isn't necessarily better. We fear DDT, but malarial mosquitoes are worse. We get queasy at the thought of silicone in the body, yet silicone is chemically very similar to our own carbonbased human physiology. Natural chemicals in food are often more toxic than synthetic pesticides. € Chemicals that harm animals don't necessarily harm humans. The same chemicals can affect different species in very different ways. Saccharine was once banned because it caused cancer in rats. We know now that saccharine causes cancer by interacting with rat urine in ways that do not apply to humans. € Science is highly politicized. Fifteen years ago, the media used one small study of babies born of cocaineaddicted mothers to convince America that these children were handicapped for life. In fact, there is no proof that "crack babies" are fated to do worse in later life than anyone else, but the crackbaby scare thrived because diverse constituencies found that it advanced their ideologies. Liberals pushed the story to justify government programs, while conservatives used it to demonize cocaine users. Beware of science that feeds political agendas. € Some babies are born deformed purely by chance. One in five pregnancies ends in a miscarriage; 2 to 3 percent of all babies have an inexplicable birth defect. It's no one's fault, yet about 80 percent of obstetricians in this country have been sued anyway. People don't deliberately choose to make mental errors or to remain ignorant. Too often, though, we seize the first plausiblesounding explanation that appears to cut through the confusion of life. Once we've formed a belief, we're inclined to dismiss contrary evidence. We like to tell ourselves that we're superior to the people who burned witches centuries ago. People were often killed for no better reason than a neighbor's experiencing crop failure or impotence. But we're still prone to the same basic mental errors that killed the "witches": seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, and turning scanty evidence into widespread panic.
John Stossel '69 is a correspondent for ABC-TV News. |