Just when you thought it was safe to eat Twinkies, another asbestos alarm goes off at Illinois Beach State Park.
Just when you started to feel better about a trainload of Navy-surplus napalm rolling through town, one of those TV news “health” reporters starts raving about too much chlorine in the drinking water.
Just when you start breathing easier about the health risks of cell phones, or high-tension wires and or silicone breast implants, along comes a news story claiming children who live in old houses are “at risk” for lead poisoning.
No, dear reader, this isn’t one of those “you can’t trust anything anymore” laments. It’s just one commentator’s plea for my colleagues in the media to stop blowing things out of proportion when it comes to health risks we face in our daily lives.
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The American public, I fear, is drowning in a sea of junk science, junk liability lawsuits and, sad to say, junk journalism.
Not necessarily inaccurate journalism, mind you, because there’s a grain of truth in most of the scary environmental studies and liability claims we report on every day.
And in fact, it’s not healthy to have exposed asbestos dangling inside a Twinkie factory. Nor should anyone eat those nuggets of asbestos-tainted concrete washing up on Lake Michigan beaches north of Waukegan. And yes, it would be terrible if somehow those canisters of napalm were to explode near a residential area, perhaps after a derailment or an untimely bolt of lightening.
What’s too often not reported, however, is that there’s almost no chance that anybody will get cancer from eating Twinkies or from lolling in the sand at Illinois Beach State Park. Or that you’re much more likely to get burned in a house fire than in a freak napalm accident. The Navy, you see, will be a lot more careful shipping that napalm than you are in storing the gasoline that powers your lawn mower.
The only significant health risk posed by asbestos (trace quantities of which are all around us and in our tap water) occurs when clouds of the stuff become airborne and are constantly inhaled. That billions of dollars now are being spent to remove asbestos insulation and tiles from our schools and homes, as though it were as toxic as plutonium, is testament to journalism’s failure to educate the public about relative risk.
No doubt the reporters, editors and TV producers who “go big” with scare stories think they’re doing a public service. No doubt they think it’s all worthwhile if just one toddler is prevented from ingesting an asbestos pebble or a chip of lead paint. Besides, there’s no grabbier way to lead a newscast or front-page expose than with a screamer about danger-in-the-water, danger-in-the-air or danger-in-the-supermarket.
But these exaggerations are not altogether harmless. Not when the viewing and reading public comes away with a wildly distorted view of what the real health risks are in American life.
Instead of worrying about the real dangers that confront us–obesity, cigarettes, alcohol, handguns, to name just four of the worst–the public is incited almost daily to fume and fret over that which is marginally hazardous or not hazardous at all.
Heart disease is by far the leading cause of death in this country, but you don’t see many front-page exposes about our fatty diets and lack of exercise. The biggest health crisis of our time is that 30 percent of the population is medically obese, the percentage steadily rising. But who’s got time to improve their eating and exercise habits when it’s so much more compelling to share the outrage of some breathless reporter about what’s in the tap water or buried in the landfill?
Cancer is the No. 2 cause of death in these United States, but we’ve known for 25 years that the most cancer-causing agent in our midst is not PCBs or benzines. It’s tobacco smoke. Cigarettes contribute to the deaths of some 400,000 Americans a year, yet the media have done such an unconvincing job of communicating the danger that about 25 million of us are still puffing away. Meanwhile, Congress is talking about giving Big Tobacco, in return for a large cash payment, a permanent liability shield so the industry can go on selling the cursed things.
Handguns? They’re wiping out some 35,000 Americans a year when you add up all the gun homicides, accidents and suicides. The media have done such a lackluster job of conveying this horror that production of handguns, especially rapid-fire automatic pistols, has reached all-time highs, with some 12,000 new guns flooding the marketplace every day.
Then there’s motor vehicle accidents, which kill more people than guns. So concerned are we about the 42,000 slaughtered each year on the highways that we’ve raised speed limits, manufactured record numbers of heavier (and more deadly) “sport utility vehicles” and declared optional the use of life-saving airbags (so taken were we with anecdotal stories about airbag injuries.)
The problem, I suspect, is that our bad habits and bad judgments are not news. At least not the kind of news that a supposedly health-obsessed public wants to be confronted with daily.
So we watch and read the scare stories and vent our indignation on contaminated Twinkies and asbestos on the beach. Never mind that the real danger is too many Twinkies and too much time spent lying on the beach, or more likely, on the couch.