Two stories came to my attention recently testimony to our distorted health priorities thanks to activist groups' alarmist emissions and the media's slavish devotion to them:
First, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health (June issue) reported that immunization rates among black pre-school children remained embarrassingly low, even while protective vaccinations climbed to almost-satisfactory levels in whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. The rate in black children 67% is closer to what might be expected in a Third-World country. (The rate in whites, by contrast, is 75%.) We should attain a much higher level to avoid epidemics of diseases like those that killed millions in the nineteenth century and earlier. When vaccination rates fall below 70%, epidemics become much more likely, due to loss of "community immunity," the situation in which even vaccinated kids contract illnesses from their unvaccinated classmates.
Why is this going on? Several factors may be at work: persistent superstitious fear of vaccine side-effects, which continues to keep some parents from getting their kids immunized; trouble getting insurance coverage, which is lower in poorer communities; and ignorance among some parents of the fact that many old childhood scourges have not been eradicated, only controlled. Epidemics of whooping cough, chickenpox, and measles have all occurred relatively recently in the United States in areas of inadequate vaccine coverage. (See our publications about childhood vaccination.)
The other remarkable study, reported in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, supplied the amazing information that only 26% of women and 35% of men are taking aspirin to prevent heart attacks. Worse still, only 46% of women judged to be at high risk of heart disease and 59% of men similarly prognosed (due to prior cardiovascular history or diabetes) take the "trouble" to take a daily aspirin as recommended by every major medical association. (Note: Some folks should not take aspirin those who are allergic, have bleeding tendencies, or gastrointestinal ailments; ask your doctor!) Why the failure to take aspirin? Probably not enough education, whether from public health authorities or from doctors.
Another explanation for both of these stories is that too many health alarms are blaring from TV, newspaper headlines, and health columns. Many if not most of these advisories emanate from activist groups, who love to scare us continuously about phantom risks from various "toxins" and "carcinogens" in...well, everywhere! Our water, air, food, medicine chest, computer keyboards, furniture coatings, lawn fertilizers you name it, it can make us sick! (Then why are we so healthy? Don't ask!)
No wonder parents and heart patients can't figure out which news shows, health advice columns, and warnings to actually listen to. Get immunizations? Don't eat salmon? Take aspirin? Avoid insect repellants? Don't smoke? Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air? (Thanks, Tom Lehrer, c. 1963.) Who is to know what to do, what is safe, what not to do?
Ask your doctor, and, let us hope, he or she may know. (And visit http://www.acsh.org and http://HealthFactsAndFears.com frequently for sound advice on a wide range of issues.)
Gilbert Ross, M.D., is Medical and Executive Director of the American Council on Science and Health.