Fear Leads Us Forward Into The Past
Approximately 2 million Americans die each year. That’s not news per se, as we’re all going to go - later rather than sooner, most of us hope.
But that figure is worth remembering the next time you read or hear about this or that toxic threat - contaminated drinking water, empty 5-gallon containers, pesticides, irradiated food, etc. - killing untold numbers of us each year. It’s simply not true.
One thing we do know is that sometimes death can be prevented. Indeed, says Elizabeth M. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, the No. 1 priority of public health efforts in this country ought to be the prevention of premature disease and death.
As Whelan points out in “Priorities,” ACSH’s journal, we all have exactly the same mortality: 100 percent. “The difference, of course, is the timing,” she says. And we know about that, too: Of the 2 million or so U.S. deaths each year, about 1 million are premature (in the sense that they could be postponed).
Of those 1 million premature deaths, 500,000 - or one in two - are causally related to the use of tobacco, Whelan says. Another 100,000 premature deaths stem from the abuse and misuse of alcohol.
Now, don’t read this as a pro-temperance screed. But the fact that two causes account for nearly 60 percent of all premature deaths ought to be a clue as to what should be the focus of public health efforts. Other known factors - failure to use seat belts, to get disease screening, reckless recreation activities and the like - account for smaller but significant numbers of early deaths.
But what threats typically get the attention of the media, legislators and government regulators? Assume, suggests Whelan, the identity of an extraterrestrial and what would you think, after reading the popular media, are the leading causes of disease and death?
Pesticide residues, exposure to chemicals at toxic-waste sites, food additives, bird and insect droppings. Surely these are the prime agents of death. Well, we know they aren’t. So why all this misguided attention?
The answer can be found in the gospel of politically correct science preached by ideologues who have a different agenda than merely safeguarding public health. The media buy into the scam because such scare stories about unseen threats make good headlines.
Whelan suggests a number of ways to right what she terms America’s “inverted health priorities,” including getting real scientists to speak out in favor of peer-reviewed research and in opposition to politically motivated quackery, a more responsible media and the end of the “mouse is a little man” premise, which ignores the fact that the dose of exposure to potentially harmful substances is key to figuring risk.
But why should we care about the ins and outs of epidemiology? Besides the need for tax dollars to be used to counter real public-health threats, not phantom or hypothetical culprits, there’s self-preservation: Misappropriating public-health priorities can be dangerous.
Take the case of Peru. As “Reason” magazine’s Michael Fumento points out, junk science of the kind promulgated in America is being blamed for as many as 10,000 deaths there from cholera.
It seems that the government took seriously the claims that chlorine - blamed by eco-activists for everything from thinning the ozone layer to making alligators impotent - was dangerous and decided to greatly reduce the chlorination of drinking water.
As one Peruvian congressman put it to Fumento: “We’re ahead of the U.S.” in terms of enviro-chic thinking, “and have returned to the Middle Ages as a result.”
It’s a scary thought.