Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You - Softcover

Ropeik, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618143726 ISBN 13: 9780618143726

Verlag: Mariner Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

An indispensable and timely guide, Risk is the authority for assessing threats to your health and safety. We continually face new risks in our world. This essential family reference will help you understand worrisome risks so you can decide how to stay safe and how to keeps risks in perspective. Expert authors David Ropeik and George Gray include information on: - 50 top hazards - your likelihood of exposure - the consequences - ways to reduce your risk They cover topics such as: - cancer - biological weapons - indoor air pollution - pesticides - radiation

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David Ropeik has served as Director of Risk Communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. He was an award-winning journalist for two decades.
 

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INTRODUCTION

"I've developed a new philosophy . . . I only dread one day at a time."
— Charlie Brown

We live in a dangerous world. Yet it is also a world far safer in many ways
than it has ever been. Life expectancy is up. Infant mortality is down.
Diseases that only recently were mass killers have been all but eradicated.
Advances in public health, medicine, environmental regulation, food safety,
and worker protection have dramatically reduced many of the major risks
we
faced just a few decades ago.
Yet new risks have arisen. Hazardous waste. Nuclear power.
Genetically modified foods. Mad cow disease. Ozone depletion. Artificial
sweeteners. For all the unquestionable benefits of the modern technological
world and its scientific power, the march of progress that has given us
longer,
healthier lives has subjected us to new perils.
We often react to this conflict, of progress on the one hand and
risk on the other, with fear. Most of us are more afraid than we have ever
been. And not just from any single risk that happens to be grabbing the
headlines at a given point in time, whether it's terrorism or West Nile virus.
We are afraid, cumulatively, of all the new bogeymen to which our modern
existence has exposed us. Many polls find that people feel the world today
is
more dangerous for humans than it has ever been.
It is true that the industrial and information ages have spawned a
whole new range of risks, and raised awareness of those that were lurking
all
the time. But research suggests that our fears may not match the facts.
We
may be too afraid of lesser risks and not concerned enough about bigger
ones. Polls show a wide gap between what the public and the "experts"
think
is actually dangerous and what is considered relatively safe. Who's right?
There are no simple answers.
But information can help us begin to sort things out. Some basic
facts about the risks we face, or think we face, can help us make more
sense of just what we need
to worry about. The intent of this book is to provide that information. We
want
to empower you to make better judgments about how to protect yourself
and
your family and friends. Our goal is to help you put the risks you face into
perspective.

Risk issues are often emotional. They are contentious. Disagreement is
often
deep and fierce. This is not surprising, given that how we perceive and
respond to risk is, at its core, about nothing less than survival. The
perception of and response to danger is a powerful and fundamental driver of
human behavior, thought, and emotion.
In writing this book, we tried to stay as neutral about these
controversial issues as we could. We think that information devoid of
advocacy is a tough commodity to come by these days, and will be more
useful to you. We do not tell you what you should think. Nor do we make
judgments about whether a risk is big or small for you as an individual. We
offer numbers for society as a whole, but there is no overarching single
conclusion about any risk that can be drawn for each reader. Each of you
has unique circumstances that make any given risk higher or lower for you
than it might be for the next person. Ultimately, how you perceive a given
risk
is a decision for you to make in the context of your own life. We simply
hope
that you are more able to make more informed choices after reading the
information we present. As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in The Hound of the
Baskervilles, "That which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is
but hinted at and guessed."
We have gathered and analyzed the basic information available on
major risk issues and synthesized from all that research a fair presentation
that you can use to make up your mind about the risks we examine. Of
course we have made judgments along the way, about which risks to
include
or omit, about what information to offer and what information to leave out.
But
we have done so in an honest effort to get to the basic core truths about
each
risk as we see it, in as fair a way as possible. You may well disagree with
some of the judgments we've made. That's a risk we run in taking on a
subject fraught with so much emotion.
We encourage you to use this book in two ways. Reading it all
the way through will let you see how each risk compares with the others
and
will help you put them all in perspective. There are a lot of statistics in this
book. They are provided to give you an idea of how big or small each
individual risk might be. But they will also let you compare similar statistics
for various risks from chapter to chapter. Together, these numbers should
help you gain a larger view of many of the risks you face.
But we also encourage you to use this guide as you would an
encyclopedia, as a reference work you will turn to over time, whenever
there's
something about a particular risk you want to know. Each chapter, for
example, begins with a useful explanation of the specific hazard: What is
radon? How do air bags or nuclear power plants or cell phones work? What
are the most common forms of sexually transmitted or food-borne
diseases?
We hope this book remains valuable to you for some time. Yes,
the numbers of victims for various risks may change from year to year, and
we will certainly learn more about some risks than we know now. But the
nature of the consequences of alcohol consumption or radon exposure will
stay the same. Years from now the use of caffeine, the prevalence of heart
disease, the mechanics of the way radiation or lead or pesticides affects
us,
will all be pretty much the same.
We also hope you find this book useful no matter where you live.
While the numbers and exposure patterns we cite are focused on the
United
States, the details of most of the risks we explain are the same in Europe
or
Asia or South America. The effects of mercury, the science of genetic
modification of food, the persistence of some chemicals in the environment,
the way X rays work, are the same whether you live in Canada or France or
Japan. We recognize that the relative scale of risks varies from place to
place. The public health risk from cigarette smoke, for example, is higher in
Europe, where more people smoke, than in the United States. Firearms
risks
are higher for U.S. residents than citizens of any other country. At the time
of
this writing, mad cow disease is a higher risk in some nations than others.
So the data we use for exposure levels and numbers of victims, based on
statistics for the United States, may well vary for citizens of different
countries. But the general explanations of many of the risks we explore are
applicable for anyone, anywhere.

WHAT IS RISK?
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

An anonymous writer once observed, "To risk living is to risk dying." Risk is,
indeed, inescapable. But just what is risk? How do you define it? To a
stockbroker it means the prospect of losing, or making, money. Same thing
for a person at the racetrack or at a blackjack table. For a skier or a bungee
jumper or a skydiver, on the other hand, risk has more to do with physical
than fiscal health. To the person taking a pill with known side effects, it's
about choice. To the person eating food with potentially harmful ingredients
that aren't listed on the label, it's about no choice.
At it's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mariner Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0618143726
• ISBN 13: 9780618143726
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 498
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: HarperCollins Publishers Ireland; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland