Here is some good plain talk about risk perception. Fear the plain old flu – in terms of human death it gives us TEN 9/11’s each and every year.
“Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu — the boring kind — kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn’t want to hear that.
“I say, ‘You need a flu shot.’ You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, ‘Don’t talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?’”"
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36,000 is also more than TOTAL number of people KILLED by terrorism worldwide between 1968 and 2005 (34,824), according to the incident reporting tool at the Terrorism Knowledge Base. In the current panicked state of our political elite, who would believe that humble flu drawfs terrorism as a killer? But it’s true. Every year the flu kills more people in our developed nation than EVERYONE who died from terrorism WORLDWIDE in three decades. Remember, that’s taking in 9/11/2001 and several years of the Iraq war. Don’t believe me? Go to the TKB and use the analytical tools yourself and post your results. Then we’ll talk.
Statistics are wonderful. By raising the legal driving age to 18, we could save more lives each year than we lost on 9/11, but there is no will to do it. Silent Spring kills more Africans each year with its after effects of banning DDT than all the Africans killed in the cross Atlantic passage in 2 centuries.
The flu figures are probably inflated by the deaths from nosocomial infections because hospitals are such dangerous places. Full of germs. And on and on.
I think each of your cases reinforces my point — that we as Americans (people in general, really) have no real idea of actual risk. As a result we misallocate resources on a grand scale.
This year, 2.2 million children (628 times the number of 9/11 victims) will die of dehydration. The global spending needed to fix this problem would be far less than a single week’s occupation in Iraq, yet we won’t do it.