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Facts Versus Fears
from ACSH

In a way, this report is a sort of "Greatest Hits" list. But unlike a "Best of . . . " album put out to celebrate a musician's years-long body of good work, this lineup might be called a "Worst of . . . "

Since its founding in 1978 the American Council on Science and Health has been dedicated to separating real, proven health risks — such as cigarettes — from unfounded health "scares" based on questionable, hypothetical, or even nonexistent scientific evidence. This report summarizes some of the most noteworthy scares of the past half century.

In each case we review the charges made against a given product or substance — or even against an entire community. We discuss the basis for the charges, the reactions of the public and the media, and the actual facts as to what risk (if any) ever existed. Where applicable, we give an update on what the latest and most credible scientific studies have to say on each topic. The scares are presented in chronological order, arranged according to the year in which each became a major public issue.

We have chosen these scares because each received great public attention in its day — and each followed its own course to closure in terms of public and regulatory response. (For the same reason we have decided not to discuss certain current scares, such as the furor over breast implants, for which the final chapter has yet to be written.) Some of the scares examined here led to products or substances being banned. In other scares, after an initial panic, consumers shrugged off their fears.

It is interesting to note that these decisions — to ban or to forget — generally depended not on the relative magnitude of the risk but on consumers' understanding of the role the products in question played in their daily lives. In some cases a very small risk was exaggerated, or the risk was not compared with the benefits to be derived from the substance in question. In other cases the available evidence shows no risk to human health, and the people making the charges knew — or should have known — this all along.

Widespread public fears and concerns over matters of health and safety are not new to our era, of course. But what makes these particular scares unique in comparison with the panics of earlier times is that these specifically involved the products of technology, rather than the natural plagues that claimed so many lives in the past; that they were fueled by modern mass media; and that these scares emerged in a period during which Americans have enjoyed better health, an ever-increasing life span, a higher standard of living, and a greater scientific understanding of the true causes of human death and disease.

As you read this report, you will see common themes and patterns emerge in the accounts of the scares:

• the indiscriminate extrapolation of laboratory tests involving rodents fed huge doses of a given substance, with the presumption that if a substance caused cancer in these rodents, it also causes cancer in man;

• ignorance of the basic principle of toxicology, "The dose makes the poison," as consumers fretted over the presence of even a single molecule of a substance that might be hazardous in far larger amounts;

• the acceptance — implicit or explicit — of the "precautionary principle," which states: "where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent degradation." (Bear in mind here that next to no evidence can be considered "lack of scientific certainty."); and

• the fear of "synthetic" chemicals even when some of the same substances exist far more abundantly in nature.

These themes and patterns were all present in the first of our scares, the infamous 1959 "cranberry scare." They continued to pop up in almost every scare of the next three decades, and they reached their zenith with the great Alar scare of 1989.

The response to scares in the post-Alar era has been more muted. This may be due, perhaps, to public "overload" and to growing skepticism in the face of regular front-page health warnings such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest's periodic admonitions against Chinese food, Mexican food, and other popular gustatory diversions.

The purpose of this report is not, of course, merely to reflect on modern society's propensity to fear the unfamiliar. This paper is meant to serve as a cautionary tale of a different kind.

Repeated scares that focus on trivial or nonexistent risks — and the media blitzes and public panics that follow — may actually divert scarce resources away from real, significant public health risks even as they whip up needless anxiety. This report shows just how the American public has been manipulated repeatedly by certain segments of the media, by a handful of scientists outside the scientific mainstream, and by a larger coterie of activists and government regulators, all of whom have frightened the public over hypothetical risks.

This report is intended to make you, the consumer, aware of this continuing pattern. After reading Facts Versus Fears, the next time such an alarm flashes across your TV screen, you might just want to mutter, "Been there; done that" — and switch the channel.

© 1997 & 1998 American Council on Science and Health