You say tomato, I say health scare

Another year, another health scare. And the usual over-reaction and hysteria. When will people get a sense of perspective?




A very small number of people have fallen ill, and an even smaller number have died, from e-coli poisoning. Man the barricades and reach for your tin hats, the end of the world is nigh. We're doomed I tell you - doomed!



Last weekend I was in a taxi in Loughborough in the English 'East Midlands' and the nice lady driver was telling me how worrying it was. She didn't want to buy cucumbers any more - in fact she wasn't sure about any vegetables. Very worrying, isn't it? She was a lovely lady who come out at short notice to pick me up, so I didn't have the heart to tell her she'd been duped by the media and was making a fool of herself.



Because back on planet earth, we're not doomed. Really, we're not.



The risk of dying from eating vegetables contaminated with e-coli is so vanishingly small that even the most basic concept of statistics and the balance of risk would reveal that it's not worth boycotting anything.



The trouble is that the media love a scare story. It creates headlines, excitement and a hunger (pardon the pun) for updates - thus drawing in more viewers, desperate to know what the latest catastrophe is. Everyone loves a disaster, after all. And all disasters, real or not, are filtered to us through the media. In a way, disasters are media events. A true disaster, like the Japanese tsunami, doesn't need media hype. It rises above it.



It's hard to fill a 24-hour news station with new stories. Just watch Sky News for a few hours to see what I mean. The lack of news stories they have to work with is embarrassing for them - so they endlessly recycle old ones and pad them out with 'experts' - talking heads who usually either state the obvious, repeat the story in a different way or best of all speculate as to the worst-case scenario. At least Sky has advert breaks to help them - BBC News 24 doesn't have that luxury so 24 hour news is an even tougher gig for them.



Back to e-coli. If people just stopped to think for a moment they could compare the number of people who die early from diseases and conditions brought on by poor diet with those who have (or who might) keel over from e-coli in cucumbers. Or is it tomatoes? No-one really knows. Scientists' apparent helplessness in the face of this unseen and sinister killer, the image of complacent governments and poor ordinary Joes who pay the penalty all fit neatly into the plot followed by a thousand movies which have numbed us into idiocy.



In fact if the entire British population ate more veg they might live longer and healthier lives instead of clogging up the NHS with their clogged up arteries. I will now state the bleedin' obvious: that eating more veg will outweighs by a factor of thousands any risk from stray bacteria. I think people do actually know that.



But people don't want to hear that. The thousands who die from heart disease each year slip away unnoticed by the a media whose attention span has become so short that if daily updates aren't forthcoming the story will fade to black. Taxi drivers don't notice the death rate from poor diet. Those thousands of corpses are invisible.



Can you imagine the hysteria and panic if 'obesity' was classified as a communicable disease rather than a state of health? Imagine if it was some sort of virus or bacteria, never heard of before. Infection with this new virus is proven to lead to debilitation and early death, and was spread by apparently negligent and complacent producers, distributors and governments. The obesity emergency would be on Sky News round the clock, with talking heads and government action plans to tackle it.



But it doesn't work like that. People don't want to face the responsibility they have for their own demise; it's a better disaster movie if a new virulent disease emerges from nowhere and we try to protect our loved ones with boycotts. And anyway, people hate veg so this scare suits them. When the mad cow disease scare took off people were really upset because everyone likes steak. Whatever happened to BSE? You don’t' hear much about that these days. I wonder why….



So now's a good time to stock up on cheap veg. Go ahead, it will do you good. And the prices are dropping, which makes a change. Just wash it first, will you?