Lets Keep Risks in Perspective

Jon Stewart last night did a riff on the Daily Show on how the arrest of a suspect in a ten year old murder case had supplanted the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the news media, as Lebanon earlier had pushed the war in Iraq into the background. The audience of the mass media, and the media itself seem to have trouble keeping perspective on the relative importance of different stories. Unfortunately, that is not just a joking matter.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on 9/11 (2001). Foreign Policy magazine this month has an article ("9/11 + 5," not yet available on the web) that reports a very low level of fatalities in North America from terror attacks between 1998 and 2005 outside of 9/11. (It reports that the number of such deaths have increased markedly in the Middle East and Asia.)

Iraq Body Count reports today that between 40,340 and 44,871 civilians have been reported killed by military intervention in Iraq. This would seem a very conservative estimate of the true cost of the war in terms of illness, disability, and death. (I know, there is no evidence that Iraq was implicated in 9/11, but I doubt that the Administration could have gotten the authorization for the war without 9/11.) I posted earlier about the huge economic cost of the war in the United States.

The most recent complete and authoritative mortality figures for the United States are for 2003. In that year, 2,448,288 deaths occurred in the United States. The five leading causes of death were:

* Diseases of heart (heart disease) - 685,089

* Malignant neoplasms (cancer) - 556,902

* Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke) - 157,689

* Chronic lower respiratory diseases - 126,382

* Accidents (unintentional injuries) - 109,277

Basically, there have been 150 times as many deaths from accidents in the United States in the last five years from accidents as from terrorist attacks, even counting the 9/11 deaths. Can anyone believe that we have struck the right balance in the relative responses to the large and well known threats from our common health problems versus to the threat of terrorism? Of course we are spending time and effort to improve health, and of course we should take steps to combat terrorism, but really!

There are well known reasons why we make mistakes in estimating risks. We think the more memorable risks are greater. We over-estimate the importance of risks that are new, compared to risks that are familiar. We over-estimate risks that we don't understand. And we over-estimate risks that inspire terror. Thus the public probably has excessive fears of nuclear power and genetically modified crops, which are relatively new technologies that are poorly understood, with a few memorable stories of risky events.

I would suggest too, that risk mongers who encourage the public toward specific fears also have an impact.

The role of the media and of political leaders should be first to base their decision making on accurate risk measurements and second to help the public put relative risks into perspective. Responses made by a great power, such as the United States, should be measured and proportionate to the problem they seek to address.