As parents around the country were getting their children ready to go to school this morning, ABC's Good Morning America (GMA) and CNN were both giving parents warnings about how their children get to and from school one about diesel fumes on school buses, the other about ill-fitting seatbelts. GMA went with the diesel fuel story, and that raises questions about how they prioritize health stories.
GMA's Greg Hunter, in an "important" and heavily promoted "exclusive report," tells us that riding on a school bus may give your child lung cancer. He reports that a new study found that children in school buses were exposed to levels exceeding government-mandated levels of diesel exhaust. A similar study finding no health effects from such exposure did little to calm the breathless reporter or affect the overall tone of the piece.
Let's review: You have two studies, one based only on the level of fumes relative to a regulatory benchmark and the other intended to measure actual health risks from fumes. Measured against the government regulations, exposure levels exceed the limit. But the study that used actual health data shows that exposure levels do not exceed any health threshold. Sounds like something is wrong with the government standard, not with the buses.
But something else is wrong. GMA, which was given exclusive access to the school bus report, presumably in exchange for a promise to make a big deal about it, did their viewers a dual disservice. First, there is no scientific validity to the claim that diesel exhaust from school buses poses a cancer risk to children. Second, GMA could have used this valuable airtime to give parents a much more important new piece of advice about safe transportation for their children. CNN did so just minutes earlier. The Fox NewsChannel covered it too.
The other networks reported a National SAFE KIDS Campaign survey about seat belts and the proper way to restrain children in automobiles. Unintentional childhood injuries are the number one killer of children ages 14 and under. (Memo to GMA: Lung cancer from diesel school buses does not appear anywhere on the list of killers.)
According to the Safe Kids campaign, "almost half of parents are making major mistakes when it comes to protecting their children in motor vehicles." The study found that a third of children "ages 14 and under were riding in the wrong restraint type for their age and size." In addition, "the study found that 14% of the children observed were riding completely unbuckled. Older children were more likely to be both unrestrained and in the wrong restraint."
"This research tells us that parents still aren't getting it they just don't realize that they're gambling with their child's life when leaving them unbuckled or in the wrong seat," said Heather Paul, Ph.D., executive director of the National SAFE KIDS Campaign. "We need more powerful ways to persuade them more education, better laws, and stronger enforcement of those car seat laws that are on the books."
In an interview with HealthFactsAndFears.com, a spokeswoman for the National SAFE KIDS Campaign revealed that they tried to get GMA to cover their survey. GMA apparently preferred to discuss the more sinister-sounding but purely speculative threat of diesel-induced lung cancer. So, in the tension between ratings and responsibility, perhaps the call for more restraint should apply to producers, not just children in cars.
Jeff Stier, Esq., is Associate Director of the American Council on Science and Health.