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The media constantly bombard us with news of the health hazards that lurk in our everyday lives. But many of these hazards, even some that provoke regulatory action, have been greatly overblown.
According to author and epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat, low-level environmental health hazards can be hyped and distorted, leading to needless anxiety and confusion on the part of the public as well as the wasteful misallocation of resources. Given this tendency, how is the public to distinguish between exposures that have important effects on health and those that are likely to have minimal or no effect?
In this book, Kabat examines the forces that contribute to high-profile health scares and the economic, political, and psychological consequences of their "social amplification." In order to better understand the manufacture of health scares, Kabat begins with the premise that science in the area of public health does not exist in a vacuum.A number of factors can inflate the real health risks of a hazard, such as skewed reporting by the media, but also, surprisingly, the actions of researchers who hope to propel their careers with increased research funding and publications, regulatory health agencies eager to show their responsiveness to the health concerns of the public, and advocates with a stake in a particular outcome.
Following four major case studies, Kabat demonstrates how a powerful confluence of interests can subtly (or not so subtly) overstate or distort scientific evidence, sparking a chain reaction that leads to unnecessary policies and actions that divert scientists, health professionals, and the public from more important issues. Kabat carefully considers the health risks of organochlorine compounds as a cause of breast cancer, electromagnetic fields from power lines, radon within residences, and the actual dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke.
He traces the trajectory of each of these hazards from its initial emergence as a public concern to the ideological and political attention that influenced its interpretation. He then explains how more rigorous studies have ultimately changed the "disposition" of the hazard, either cementing its status as a legitimate hazard or revealing it to be much less harmful than had been initially proposed. All four case studies show how the conviction that there was a hazard emerged and held sway, in some cases for two decades or more, based primarily on a selected and consensus-affirming interpretation of the evidence. Kabat concludes with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the science of epidemiology and the need to make a firm distinction between science and political agendas.
