Fear factor
 
When the news is full of stories about bad water, mad cow disease, "flesh eating" bacteria or even a tenuous link between hair dye and cancer, we fret -- despite an almost infinitesimally small risk -- and ignore the real hazards. Published: The Vancouver Sun, May 12, 2001, Op-ed column By Deborah Jones The news is full of dire warnings about hazards to life or health. Stories include sleeping in a garbage dumpster and being compacted, tailing a street sweeper and being crushed, drinking tap water and being infected by a parasite, and leaving a window open and being attacked by a raccoon. Of these four cases, two Canadians died. Hazards to life or health that didn't make such gripping narratives this week include heart disease, cancer, stroke and emphysema. Over just one week, these diseases killed some 2,726 Canadians (deduced from the latest Statistics Canada data, from 1997, on leading causes of death). They also ravaged the health of untold thousands more people. So how do we respond to such information? Why, we run as fast as we can to the store and buy bottled water, in fear of parasites pouring out of our taps. Cryptosporidium is on our minds, because it's thought to have contributed in a minor way to the death in North Battleford, Sask., of someone already very sick. (Originally, news stories had linked it with three deaths). Water problems like those in North Battleford are behind sales increases of up to 300 per cent of bottled water. Perhaps those of us who read The Vancouver Sun story about the raccoon that entered through a Ladner woman's bedroom window and bit her face are now shutting our windows at night. Any parent who shuddered, reading about the street sweeper that ran over a nine- year-old in Fort Erie, Ont., will warn their kids about the machines. As for the 36-year-old Saskatoon man taking a kip in a dumpster that got dumped ... well, let's call that story an oddity - - besides, the likelihood of that happening again is more than remote. If we were logical creatures, instead of fretting about such hazards and buying bottled water, we'd drink tap water (which we'd boil, for very young children and those with weak immune systems) and reduce our risks with other measures: * The 22 per cent of us who smoke would quit (smoking causes 30 per cent of all cancers). * The 30 per cent of us who are overweight would shed fat. * We'd all eat more fruits and vegetables, known to promote health and ward off disease. * We'd all engage in a fitness regime. * We'd consider that some 152 Canadians die each week from unintentional injuries, then we'd more carefully drive cars, cross roads or operate workplace machinery. Yes, I know, there is a risk of getting sick from tap water. In B.C., there are at least 200 reports annually of cryptosporidium infection, which can cause diarrhea but is hardly ever lethal in a healthy person. Trying to avoid cryptosporidium is understandable -- but if we think buying bottled helps, we're deluding ourselves. Water bottlers face the same problem municipal water systems have in filtering out or killing the parasite's hardy cysts. Bottles may make us feel better, but there's no assurance they're free of contaminants. As John Blatherwick, chief medical officer of the Vancouver/Richmond health board notes, "85 per cent of the surface water in the world has cryptosporidium in it." If any good comes out of the publicity over water problems in North Battleford and Walkerton, Ont., we'll treasure water as a valuable commodity, improve outdated water systems, and never ever put incompetent alcoholics in charge of water supplies, as Walkerton did, or build sewage outlets upstream from municipal water intakes, as North Battleford did. Buying bottled water in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax, however, does nothing more than provide us with a psychological placebo. It's understandable, because it's a whole lot easier than taking real measures to reduce hazards, like quitting smoking. "For smokers the thought of quitting is traumatic," says Libby Brown of the B.C. Cancer Agency. "It's hard to give up, so they go for things that are easy to fix." The media is partly responsible for our silliness. Print and broadcast stories about North Battleford's water woes (and Walkerton's before it), contribute to what University of B.C. professor Tim McDaniels calls "social amplification of risk." Thus, when the news is full of stories about bad water, mad cow disease, "flesh eating" bacteria or even a tenuous link between hair dye and cancer that once had our knickers in a knot, we fret about those things -- despite an almost infinitesimally small risk. We also most fear risks that are outside our control. Why else would we dismiss the risks of smoking cigarettes, ingesting fatty foods or riding in automobiles? "We all believe in general that cars are something we can control, and we take the risk voluntarily," explains McDaniels, a specialist in risk and decision making. "What you choose to do for recreation, you're deciding that, nobody is deciding it for you." Political scientist Kathryn Harrison of UBC adds that we may ignore information about such hazards because we've already made up our minds. "If (smokers) saw a newspaper full of stories about smoking, they probably wouldn't read them, because they've already made choices." Blatherwick, who knows more about risks to life and health than most of us, drinks Vancouver tap water and advocates a healthy lifestyle. I think he's right. Pour a glass, and drink up. Copyright Deborah Jones 2001 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. 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Fretting about the wrong risks
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