"Scared to Death"

moonrakerz

Having just read another "scare story" about low energy lamps: Excessive UV exposure - not Mercury this time !......................

Could I recommend an excellent book on this general topic:

"Scared to Death" by Christopher Booker and Richard North.

It gives an interesting insight into some of the "scares" that we have survived over the past few years.
BSE, Salmonella in eggs, Listeria, Health & Safety, Y2K, etc, etc, etc

cuddlymarm

Hi

If you didn't eat or do anything because specialists have come up with a study on it we would all have starved by now. I've come to the conclusion of just getting on with it and hoping for the best. (Apart from eating sweeties and cake which I've proved that eating too many makes you fat):eek:

Cuddles:rotfl:

Ken68

£11.49 from Amazon.
ISBN - 978-0826486141 if you want to get it from the library.
Can't wait.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scared-Death-Global-Warming-Costing/dp/0826486142

... by clicking on a link to the side
can view some of the pages

Volcano

Putting food scares aside (which one of the authors is qualified to comment on) the rest is lamentable, i.e.:

They also allege passive smoking is safe, speed cameras cost lives, and BSE was never a threat to UK health. Individuals who disagree are simply scaremongers. Again, most of the evidence is flaky. Going back to their major bogey, climate change, Booker and North claim a US National Academy report in 2000 concluded Earth's lower atmosphere, the troposphere, had cooled between 1980 and 2000. It didn't. It showed a warming. Similarly, they say the 'hockey stick' graph commonly used to show Earth's rapidly rising temperatures has been discredited and dropped from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last assessment report. In fact, it appears on page 467.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/dec/09/scienceandnature.features

Possibly what you'd expect when you have a food expert and a historian attempting to deny climate change science.....

moonrakerz

Ah, a review from the Guardian, guaranteed to be impartial !

The review starts off by trying to discredit the book by stating that the planet Mars is not warming up as the book claims. Nasa says it is, a book reviewer in the Guardian says it isn't - draw your own conclusions from that.

Most of the content of this book is factually correct - easy, when First Class Honours Degrees in Hindsight come three-a-penny.
One example (of many): The Independent forecast 500,000 deaths from BSE by 2010. To date there have been 166 (figures from the Guardian - for impartiality !) from vCJD, AND there is still no definite proof that vCJD comes from BSE infected cattle. The 500,000 was based on the latest shock-horror discovery that BSE had crossed the species barrier into sheep - until they discovered that the "sheep" brains they had been studying actually came from cattle !

The group which, deservedly, comes in for most criticism in the book is the media. Even now there are attempts to resurrect the "old scare stories". On Jan 3 2008 - The Guardian (surprise, surprise !) ran a story headed:-

"Brain disease death raises fear of link to BSE meat of 90s"

The story concerned ONE woman who died in 2000 (she actually fell ill in the "90's") from a brain disease which still hasn't been identified properly. If you read the article, it finally admits that the maximum number of deaths that could occur, if this is BSE related is around 160. That number rings a bell somewhere .............
Guess how many more cases there have actually been ................ZERO !
(In true Guardian style the original report stated that the woman suffered from an "unsteady gate" - hardly lends credence to the story )

This book shows many of the lies, half truths and vested interest motivated manoeverings that were being bandied around at the time as the Gospel truth. If it makes people stop and question some of what is going on at the present moment - so much the better !
Read the book, even read the "Gruniad"- draw your conclusions

feesh

Bloody hell, as non-impartial as the Guardian is, you could hardly describe Christopher Booker as impartial! He has a very strong agenda.

I wouldn't touch his book with a bargepole - in any case it is all a bit pointless anyway. There is always an initial "scare" before things settle down and become part of normal daily life.

Lots of the things he is referring to are still issues.

e.g. pregnant women now routinely stay away from soft cheese, because of the Listeria threat - just because it's not all over the "meeja" doesn't mean it's not still an issue!

tomstickland

The risk from low energy bulbs is low. Using one at close quarters was equivalent to being outside in sunlight from what I read.

moonrakerz

tomstickland wrote: »

The risk from low energy bulbs is low. Using one at close quarters was equivalent to being outside in sunlight from what I read.

"Close quarters" was defined as less than one inch !

moonrakerz

feesh wrote: »

Bloody hell, as non-impartial as the Guardian is, you could hardly describe Christopher Booker as impartial! He has a very strong agenda.

I wouldn't touch his book with a bargepole - in any case it is all a bit pointless anyway. There is always an initial "scare" before things settle down and become part of normal daily life.

Lots of the things he is referring to are still issues.

e.g. pregnant women now routinely stay away from soft cheese, because of the Listeria threat - just because it's not all over the "meeja" doesn't mean it's not still an issue!

I'm glad you actually admit to not reading the book - as your comments clearly show that !

The main thread(s) of the book is not poo-poohing salmonella, listeria, BSE or whatever, but about the way in which it was "handled" by many of those involved.

I totally agree with you, Listeria, salmonella, e coli are a still a problem but they were never the massive problem that they were hyped up to be.
When Edwina Currie made her (in)famous statement about salmomella, what she said was absolutely correct, Much of our egg production was (still is) infected with salmonella - what she didn't say was that the eggs were infected with salmonella.
Eating undercooked chicken is still the quickest way to get food poisoning.

As the book says, any outbreak of food poisoning was immediately ascribed to eggs - whether the people who went down with food poisoning had actually eaten any eggs or not ! About the time of this panic there was an increase in food poisoning cases - the reason is still not understood, possibly just poor food hygiene - and the number of cases fell back to "normal" after a few years.

You are correct when you say "things settle down after a bit" - but during that "bit", in the case of salmonella, millions of chickens were needlessly slaughtered, farmers went bust and the tax-payer - you and I - footed the bill !

As I said before, read the book - much of it is undisputed fact - just because someone whose politics you disagree with wrote it doesn't make it wrong.
I even read the Guardian - if there is no Sun , Metro or ad posters to read

shaven-monkey

Think of the children!
Won't somebody please think of the children?

Books about risk assessment and debunking popular memes just aren't accessible to the children.

tr3mor

Have you heard about the DHMO scare?

http://www.dhmo.org/

:eek: