It is natural to try to avoid risk. All animal species try to protect themselves, and we are no exceptions. However, just as our bodies are still essentially adapted to a semi-nomadic, hunter/gatherer way of life but now have to cope with a largely settled and secure existence in a manmade environment, so our instincts are still essentially for a flight or fight response to perceived immediate danger.
Over the roughly ten millennia following the development of farming and the formation of settled communities, risks have changed. Like pretty much everything else, the rate of change has been far faster over the last century than ever before. Our instincts still help us to react quickly to potentially dangerous situations, but many of today’s risks are of a different nature from those which make instant flight or fight realistic options.
In most ways, life today is incomparably safer and more comfortable than that of only a few generations ago. Standards of nutrition have improved (with the unfortunate negative consequence of rising levels of obesity), our air and water quality is much better and medical advances (particularly in treatment of infection) mean that premature death in the industrialised world is far lower than ever seen before. Overall life expectancy continues to increase year on year.
However, many of today’s risks are cumulative and long-term. Smoking and exposure to asbestos dust are obvious examples. Our species’ uniquely developed perception of longer timescales and sense of self can help us to avoid such risks, but also has its downsides, sometimes including a heightened fear of what the future may have in store for us. This is particularly true as day-to-day life has become easier and safer.
With little understanding of the causes of infectious diseases and no effective means to treat them, early death of children was a cruel fact of life before the introduction of antibiotics. Since then, infant mortality in the rich world has become uncommon and is now an individual personal tragedy rather than a likely occurrence. Safety of adults at work has also improved enormously. With such once-common existential risks now largely a thing of the past, our minds are free to dwell on others, whether real or hypothetical.
This is where the problem starts: perception of risk is an individual thing and not always entirely rational. The nature of the risk has a big part to play. It is well known that people generally are more concerned about risks about which they have no real choice, that are not directly tangible and which may have a delayed impact.
This explains, for example, why some people will choose to take part in hazardous sports but may buy organic food because they believe – misguidedly – that it contains no pesticide residues and is therefore healthier. On the other hand, given the well-established link between smoking and the risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, we might expect cigarette use to have effectively died out, which it clearly has not. Personal decisions are not always logical ones, and for each person who tries to avoid small long-term health risks, there is another who chooses to think the statistics apply to other people and not them.
Some hazards now have such a bad public image that it is difficult to find lay people who do not regard them as intrinsically dangerous. One such is pesticides, which have contributed very significantly towards both food security and quality and which have no negative effect on consumer health when used properly (neither any risk to spray operators as long as simple and sensible precautions are taken). But repetition of the facts is not enough to allay fears.
Nuclear radiation is another public bugbear. Perhaps given the destructive power of thermonuclear bombs, this is not surprising, but unfortunately this fear has also created opposition to nuclear power generation. Concerns about exposure to ionising radiation are actually grossly inflated, mainly because scientists initially thought there was no safe dose, leading to unnecessarily low maximum exposure levels being set. These have both increased the costs of building nuclear power plant and sensitised the public to the slightest increase in background radiation.
In fact, environmental levels of radiation vary from place to place, but there is no evidence, for example, that people living or working in granite buildings (granite has higher levels of radioactivity than many other building materials) suffer in any way. Even the present fashion for granite kitchen worktops has also raised concerns, but this also seems to be a perfectly safe practice (see Granite Countertops and Radiation advice from the US government). It is also true that no-one died from radiation exposure because of the Fukushima disaster, while the evacuation of so many people and fears induced will have caused a high degree of stress. Similarly, the impact of the Chernobyl meltdown – pretty much the worst-case scenario for a reactor incident – has been much overstated. For more background information on this issue, see Nuclear Radiation – friend or enemy? published by Scientists for the Public Understanding of Radiation (SPUR).
Contrast this unnecessary fear of radiation with the scare over the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. When now-discredited reports of a link between the vaccine and autism were reported by Dr Andrew Wakefield, many worried parents did not have their children vaccinated. This trend continued to a degree even when it was public knowledge that Wakefield’s conclusions were based on a flawed study of a small number of children and that there was no further evidence to support his hypothesis (see MMR research timeline for more information).
But chickens are now coming home to roost. Because vaccination rates dropped below the level which would give sufficient protection, an epidemic of measles has broken out in the UK, particularly in parts of South Wales. Measles is rarely fatal, but is a serious childhood illness and can have a lasting impact on health. Despite the weight of evidence, many parents chose not to protect their children from these diseases because of the unwarranted fear of autism.
Of course, making a personal decision on behalf of a single child is very different from making a policy decision which affects a whole population, so it is understandable that some parents have made such a choice. However, when it comes to managing the risks inherent in pesticides and nuclear power, for example, it is incumbent on politicians to minimise harm while maximising benefits wherever possible. Unfortunately, our current obsession with precaution does not achieve this.
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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