Anthrax, kissing girls and other hazaards

The relationship between snowplows, anthrax and kissing girls is relevant to the specter of biological terrorism currently hanging over this nation.

As a boy I often hid by the side of the road during snowstorms and waited for the snowplow to come by. When it came abreast I would jump into the wave of snow coming off the huge wing plow and let it throw me like a big wave at the beach. It never occurred to me that the plow could have killed and buried me in a heartbeat. At that stage in my life I was also afraid to kiss girls because word was they had “cooties” which could cause your lips to rot off. Kissing those strange creatures of the opposite sex seemed much more dangerous than catching a wave off a snowplow.

Personal anxiety about anthrax is a bit like that; we as individuals are worrying excessively about strange “cooties” that pose a tiny risk to any single one of us. We should instead focus our risk reduction efforts on the common causes of death that have always hidden in the shadows just around the corners of our lives.

Anthrax has killed 20 Americans in the last 100 years, but in the next 10 minutes, about 20 Americans will die of some preventable illness or injury. An estimated 2,700 Americans will die of preventable injury or illness by this time tomorrow. Tobacco kills 500,000-plus Americans each and every year; by comparison, as a cause of personal mayhem and death, tobacco makes terrorism of any kind look like a pimple on our rear ends. The media helps to skew our sense of relative risk; it makes one anthrax death in Florida sound like an express train coming at us while the deaths of a million Americans every year from preventable illness and disease sound like a dropping pin.

This is not to say bioterrorism is not a legitimate threat. It is, and with our support the government should worry and take appropriate defensive steps. That is its job, but ours is different. My widowed mother used to tell her six children that she did the work and let God do the worrying. (She could because until now she did not know I played chicken with snowplows.) Americans need to do something similar when it comes to our personal fears about anthrax and other forms of bioterrorism. We, as individuals, should worry to the extent necessary to learn about the risk and support appropriate precautions, then rank that risk where it belongs in our minds, somewhere down below uncommon cancers and being hit by lightning.

We should only take personal steps, and only harbor personal fears, that are proportionate to our personal risk of harm from bioterrorism, and that risk is tiny.

In doing so we should then do the real work; respond to the fact that our big risks are not the esoteric bugs of terror du jour, but the snowplows of common, preventable disease and injury coming at us out of the dark. Those risks are cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, injury, smoking, etc. We can all get our pap smears, exercise, and send our cigarettes to Mr. bin Laden for him to die from, and will then have done far more to ensure our longevity than taking antibiotics to prevent pulmonary anthrax every time we cough. We can talk to our teenagers about car crashes and suicide (kill thousands of American teens every year) much more than anthrax (has not killed any American teen for a hundred years). Put more bluntly, we can get our priorities straight; if we drive around without seatbelts while talking on car phones about our anthrax worries we are, at that moment, morons (albeit lovable and attractive ones, I’m sure) whose risk of death or injury is much greater from crashing our cars than it ever will be from anthrax.

Terrorists win without trying if we all buy gas masks to counter a bioterrorism threat that is minute for each of us individually, and die for lack of seatbelts, as do about 20,000 Americans every year. (Think of going unbelted as doing Mr. bin Laden’s work for him.) Moreover, if we let the anthrax bogeyman worry us to great personal distraction we will lose focus on those health issues that should matter far more to us and ours. We will also spend too many precious health-care dollars on risks that are not the ones that bring patients to our ER’s every day. We will hand victory in the battle for our hearts and minds to the enemy.

We will also be too nervous to kiss those girls, now that we know the “cootie” thing, thank goodness, was all a crock.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.