What doesn't worry you is the really scary stuff

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 10, 2001

There's a big empty gap on the supermarket shelf where the bug spray used to be. There's one can left. I ask the stocker, where's all the mosquito repellent? He says, I dunno, we usually don't run out. Must be a lot of mosquitoes out there. I say, must be. Maybe it's that West Nile thing.

West Nile virus! It is the latest threat in our ongoing Summer of Menace. Perfect. We've worked our way through alligator attacks and shark attacks and pet-killing Bufo marinus toads, and had our first close brush with a tropical storm. The really good hurricanes won't come until later and we need something to fill the TV time until then. So we populate the air itself with deadly risk.

The virtue of a West Nile scare, as opposed to, say, mad cow disease, is that we have a couple of real, live human beings up in North Florida diagnosed with the virus. This 2-in-16-million occurrence makes the threat much more credible. Society demands bug spray and vaccines and government action. Sprayers are working overtime.

What we talking about is, basically, the flu.

In a typical adult, the West Nile virus produces a few days of "flu-like" symptoms. It is true, as we are warned ominously, that children and the elderly are at greater risk of grave complications.

But that also is true of the flu.

In a normal year, 20,000 or more people in the United States die of flu-related sickness. In an epidemic year, that can top 100,000. The flu toll in Florida the year before last was 3,300. So far West Nile has been blamed for nine deaths, all in the New York area. How is it that nine deaths are scary, and 20,000 are not?

Human nature, is how. Some of the same people worried about getting cancer from radon, or high-voltage power lines, or pressure-treated lumber, or cell phones, have a cigarette dangling from their mouth. Some of the same people seriously worried about West Nile refuse to put on a seat belt.

You want to do something about major threats to public health?

Quit smoking. Buckle up. Eat vegetables. Take walks. Wear sunscreen. Cook your chicken. Wash your hands.

All are proven to work.

I talked to several experts on the way we perceive risk. Not surprisingly, our feeling of risk decreases (whether justified or not) with familiarity, with our sense (or illusion) of control, with the distance in time from the feared result.

We feel safe in our cars, and nervous in airplanes, when in truth we are in constant peril in the first and incredibly safe in the second.

We lie awake at night, dreading being struck down at random by cancer. We play that scene over and over in our minds -- the doctor saying, "I have bad news . . ." Not many people finish that dark fantasy with the words, "You have cardiovascular disease," which is the nation's biggest killer.

The next cigarette will not kill us by itself. The next car ride without a seat belt usually won't, either. Each time we indulge without consequence provides a form of subconscious reinforcement. We know colon cancer is the most preventable of all, but, hey, there's a steak on the grill.

Newness itself is a cause for fear. Risk-perception expert Paul Slovic of Seattle told me we naturally respond with fear while we try to determine the "signal value" of a new threat -- basically, how bad can this thing get?

In time, the risk recedes into the background of everyday life. This is bad and good. Bad, because most risks are no smaller just because we are used to them. Good, because if we worried about all the things we could possibly worry about, we would never get anything done. This is how we are made.

"Risk," Slovic said, "resides in us as a feeling." That is nicely put. Risk is an emotion, not a statistic. In the end we can't ignore what our hearts and our gut tell us. That does not mean we can't double-check it with the head.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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