Panic again on all sides from the typical woman interviewed in a typical newspaper - All my daughters have had this vaccine
by admin
Panic again on all sides, from the typical woman interviewed in a typical newspaper - "All my daughters have had this vaccine, and so a question mark hangs over them all It's extremely worrying. It's a terrible situation" - to the commentators who decided that the vaccine could have "infected an indefinite number of millions of people", and who called for "a shakeout of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries & Food".Are these waves of panic wholly rational? Sure, we don't yet know how long the incubation period for CJD might be, and so we don't know how many as yet undiagnosed cases might be about to erupt. But we can say that 14 people died of variant CJD in the first six months of this year Fourteen - a tragedy for each family. But you could compare it with, say, the 15,000 people who died of lung cancer in Britain in the same period.
In France, the death toll from variant CJD so far amounts to two. Does that make your steak in a Paris restaurant look a little more tasty again, in retrospect?If these fears are not always entirely rational, that doesn't stop them affecting people deeply And they certainly don't stop with BSE. No other generation has so eagerly subjected itself to such a rollercoaster of scares. There are health scares, above all, from fear of the sun to fear of sex to fear of over-the-counter cold cures (which were implicated last week in a higher risk of strokes); but there are also all those others, from fear of crime to fear of transport disasters.It seems as if the longer we live and the safer our lives are, the more we tremble, the more we shake.
Any report of any kind of disaster - even one with incalculably tiny risks - seems to spawn a flurry of desperate anxiety. A little girl is killed, and everyone's children are kept at home. A rail accident kills four passengers, and rail travel is deemed a "lottery". An aircraft crashes, and all the planes like it are grounded.
Ask not for whom the front page speaks, it speaks for thee.An interesting little book published this week, The Tyranny of Health, by Michael Fitzpatrick, a GP who practises in Hackney in London, argues that health scares have now "acquired a virtually continuous presence in the life of society, coexisting with an unprecedented level of free-floating anxiety about health".He says that the patients whom he sees in his east London clinic can be divided between the actually ill, who still get a poor deal from the overstretched NHS, and the deluge of the worried well - the middle-class young people who are shaking in their shoes at the prospect of, say, contracting CJD from beef or getting thrombosis from being on the Pill - and who insist on endless screenings, appointments and reassurances, no matter how healthy they are.Yet for the worried well, life has never been so safe. We live longer than ever before, our food is safer, crime is falling, our trains and roads are no more dangerous than in previous generations. But still fears are hyped, so we give up uncooked eggs one year, beef the next, we don't let our children play in the streets, and we call up the helplines to find out if we've been given a vaccine that almost certainly poses no real risk to our health.What lies behind these surges of anxiety? It's interesting to note that the public and the media tend to alight on scares that can be fed not just with fear, but also with fury. What most have in common is that they are fed and watered by our dissatisfaction with "them", a faceless establishment that seems to direct our lives and over which we have absolutely no control.This is, surely, part of what lies behind the vigour of the BSE scare. Even if the risks involved in eating beef in France or of having had a polio vaccine are incalculably small, the point is that people feel that they have been hoodwinked. Although thousands will happily light up their Marlboro Lights, laughing in the face of well-known big risks, a tiny risk of a mysterious new disease becomes so compelling partly because it seems to emanate from the depths of a callous, faceless establishment.As the BSE-CJD report will no doubt confirm, secrecy, dilatoriness and inefficiency ruled.
