David Ropeik
David Ropeik
David P. Ropeik is an international consultant, author, teacher, and speaker on risk perception and risk communication. He is also creator and director of Improving Media Coverage of Risk, a training program for journalists. He is a regular contributor to Big Think, Psychology Today, Cognoscenti, and the Huffington Post...
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The risk you can't do anything about feels scarier than the one you can. Washing your hands a lot, sneezing into your elbow, knowing that avoiding crowded places if there's a flu epidemic of any kind, those are applicable. They're emotionally reassuring in the face of some new threat. New threats are always scarier than ones we've lived with for a while. It's just their newness.
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We should be concerned about medical errors, not the kind when a doctor leaves a scissors in you, or cuts off the wrong arm, but nurses not washing their hands and spreading infections, prescriptions not filled out accurately. Medical errors are attributed to causing as many of a 100,000 deaths a year in North America,