By John Stossel
Posted: Tuesday, November 4, 2003

EDITORIAL
Publication Date: November 4, 2003

Recently TV newsmagazines (including mine) have done alarming reports on the danger of sharks, sandwiches, shoes, washing your hands too much, not washing your hands enough, coffee pots, breakfast, fruit, vegetables, your dry cleaning, dolls, cribs, crowds, day care, elevators, escalators, school buses, playgrounds, nail salons and shopping carts - and repeatedly on supposedly dangerous chemicals, like those used in rubber duckies.

We don't make these threats up; there's always some real news behind them. Some Americans are killed by coffee pots and escalators. But that doesn't mean we should trumpet the scares on national TV. When we frighten people about small risks, it makes it harder to focus on bigger threats, like smoking or driving drunk.

I've gotten good at fighting off the TV producers who want to do stories on say, exploding Bic lighters. I refer them to the "death list" posted on my office wall. It lists what kills people in America, and helps me point out that hot tap water and plastic bags are deadlier than what probably alarmed the producer: More Americans drown in toilets than are killed by Bic lighters. Since few producers want to do stories on toilets or plastic bags, the story usually goes away.

I have more trouble with chemical scares. When an environmental group says a common chemical causes cancer or birth defects, how do I know if it's a real threat, or nonsense? In the Spring of 2002, self-appointed consumer guardians claimed that acrylamides - chemicals formed in frying high-carbohydrate foods like potatoes - caused cancer.

This newspaper ran a headline that said "Crispy = Cancer." USA Today asked: "Can French fries give you cancer?"

When scares like that cross my desk, I often turn to the American Council on Science and Health. The scientists at ACSH were quickly able to put the hyperbole in perspective - noting that acrylamides could be detected in a wide range of foods, not just snacks like French fries (which are easier to make people feel guilty about). They noted that the fact that high dose exposure to acrylamides caused rodent tumors had no relevance in predicting human cancer risk.

Tonight, I join ACSH at its 25th anniversary celebration, where they will honor real scientists, like Dr. D. A. Henderson, who helped eradicate smallpox, thereby saving millions of lives, and Dr. Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing methods of increasing crop yields, thereby saving, by some estimates, a billion lives.

Somehow, the real scientists get less publicity than the activists.

Seldom (if ever) do the activists do the large-scale, statistical studies and number-crunching to see if the substances they're worried about really raise disease rates. Some of the big-name environmental groups that generate scares don't even claim to have scientists on their boards; they issue their "findings" straight to the media instead of going through peer review.

To many reporters, that doesn't matter: The activist group has some evidence of what sounds like a serious risk. They're usually accusing a rich corporation of poisoning innocent people. And that morality play makes good TV.

Distraught parents shout angry soundbites, such as "They don't care about my babies!" Science journals might put the risk in perspective, but they don't make good TV.

Reporters should spend more time consulting with the heads of respected university toxicology departments - and science-based groups - and less time chasing after the latest doomsday prediction or "natural" diet fad.

It often turns out that an idea that sounds like a hot controversy on the news is actually old hat to scientists, and long since discredited: saccharin as a danger to humans, electric and magnetic fields as a brain cancer cause, and on and on. Journalists have a duty to seek the truth, even when it isn't as terrifying as we might like.

Most foods and chemicals are safe, as ACSH has been saying for 25 years. That may not be good fodder for news broadcasts, but it's good news for the human race.

John Stossel is co-anchor, "ABC News 20/20" and author of"Give Me A Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Scam Artists, and Cheats and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media," due out early next year.

Source Notes:  
New York Post