Fear Has Big Eyes
Red Alert – Red Alert, batten down the hatches, uncover the lifeboats and, while you’re at it, damn those torpedoes. The “International Agency for Cancer Research,” a panel of the World Health Organization, has ignited a media firestorm by claiming that the radio-frequency electromagnetic fields that cell-phones emit are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Sounds frightening, doesn’t it? But then being encased in a long tube, some 35,000 feet above the earth, to be propelled through space at 600 mph also sounds a tad risky. Yet millions of people around the world fly every year and we know that the statistics clearly show that it is the safest form of transportation, including walking. But fear, as I’ve noted before in this column, has great, big eyes. Sensationalism, high-wire coverage and hysteria headlines have become as pervasive in the modern world as high cholesterol. And like sex — baby it sells. The apparatchiks can hawk these hyperventilated fears all they want — this consumer isn’t buying. I might have been impressed by things called the “World Health Organization” in my imbecilic pubescent years but having settled into the autumn of middle-aged complacency, pronouncements by self-proclaimed public guardians have more the malodorous scent of ordure than they do hard science.
We’ve been there before: Love Canal, pesticides, Three Mile Island and now the dreaded cell phone, none of which has ever resulted in a single documented death. Indeed, despite the enormous increase of cell phone use over the past 20 years both the incidence and mortality rates for brain cancer as well as other cancers have markedly decreased. Where there have been documented increases in cancer the culprit has been more sophisticated diagnostic tools and longevity, since the longer we live the more likely some form of cancer will materialize. One wonders how the alarmists reconcile the “sky is falling” rhetoric, with the indisputable fact that people who make their home in Western civilization are living better and longer than ever before. But for the purveyors of hype, facts are never a stumbling block and fictions frequently serve as a springboard.
I’ve seen this kind of overwrought reaction up close and personal. Those who are swept away by terror over cell towers can ignore with casual indifference that microwaves in their kitchen emit more radiation than cell phones. For a species that has survived plagues, natural disasters and wars for millennia, our hearts are easily set aflutter at the most preposterous nonsense. Even the WHO admits that while their study raises concerns it’s inconclusive. For though this particular research was conducted in 13 countries, it was a “case controlled study” where researchers compared patients with cancer with healthy subjects and then tried to quantify their past cell phone use to make critical distinctions. Not terribly reliable or reassuring. Proving that people who developed brain cancer would not have acquired it if they did not use cell phones is highly problematical. Proving a negative is tricky business. My own view is that radiation levels from cell phones are just too low to cause brain cancer and hence worrying about it is probably the most harmful thing about cell phone use.
These reservations won’t be shared by federal legislators looking for yet another opportunity to bray about their credentials as public watchdogs. Nor can you expect any restraint from tort lawyers, a sinister sect of voracious vampires, ready to pounce headlong at the cash trough. These overreactions on behalf of public safety are prohibitively costly as the episodic misadventures of asbestos amply demonstrate. While it’s true that heavy exposure to airborne asbestos is dangerous and needs to be regulated, every other aspect of it involves a very manageable risk. But instead of exercising a little sensible caution we manufactured an entire industry of reconstructive surgery triggered by the slightest incursion into the infrastructure of our public buildings and corporate offices that continues to stymie progress and rob our pocketbooks.
Society should focus on things that really kill people. Like stairs, for example. Approximately a thousand people a year die from falling down stairs. That’s a thousand more deaths than Three Mile Island and Love Canal combined. But no one seems to care very much about stairs (when was the last time you saw a screaming headline referencing these killers that lurk in our homes) except on occasion when you hear that there are more accidents in the home than anywhere else. We should spend less time courting the chimerical and more time cultivating solutions to the real assassins. Such things as smoke detectors, seat belts and air bags should be loudly and strongly promoted because they are proven lifesavers.
Even with safety enhancements on our roads, traffic deaths from automobiles every year is still scandalous — 40 or 50 thousand fatalities a year. But there is a high-threshold of tolerance for these fatalities since Americans love their cars. The next time someone tells you that risk is not worth a single life ask them about the cars they drive. In no other area do we put so low a premium on risk than the automobile and yet we could easily bring traffic-related deaths down to virtually zero by building cars that do not exceed 15 mph and prohibiting left hand turns. Just try enacting these vehicular traffic measures and you will have a revolution on the streets that by comparison would make the civil unrest in Yemen appear like a revival meeting of Quaker pacifists. On the other hand the automobile industry (when it’s not being bailed out) has been a tremendous boon for America and elsewhere by creating derivative benefits that have improved and saved lives on a vast scale. New technologies are not shortening or inhibiting our lives; they lengthen and enhance them. As a social historian once observed, life before the 20th century was impossible. Technology has revolutionized for better man’s life on this planet demonstrating that progress is not a bane, it is a necessity.
My skepticism over scaremongering has deep and long-standing roots dating back to the summer of 1970. Air pollution was a huge issue back then and the narrator of the program I was watching ominously predicted that our air quality would grow steadily worse precipitating a mad exodus from the cities to the countryside as the atmosphere congealed into a toxic brew sometime in 1985. I remember that the narrator’s grave, orotund voice made these minatory prognostications very real for this gullible 12-year-old who had haunting visions of Armageddon dancing through his head consoled only by the thought that 15 years hence was a faraway country.
But the seasons fleetingly passed in a kaleidoscopic haze until the year 1985 dawned brightly over the historical horizon. I remember, not long after, going into Manhattan one jaunty spring morning and somewhere, not far from Penn Station, I stopped and breathed in a long, lungful of citified oxygen. It felt good and I felt good; in fact we should all feel good that we live in a technological age where yesterday’s challenges can be seen only in the fading light of a distant memory.
