1505 The Fear Factor

Yesterday I heard the Katrina disaster figures being revised from tens of thousands to hundreds to "we just don't know." We don't know yet how many people died, and of that number, how many died because they couldn't or didn't get out of the way of the hurricane, or how many might have died of heart attack or stroke brought on by fright. We know several died in Florida when it was a category one, and over a hundred in Mississippi. But here's an interesting article about the "fear factor."

"Recently, a report issued by a group called the Chernobyl Forum, a committee made up of several different UN-related organizations, gave a far less alarming assessment [of the Chernobyl catastrophe in the Ukraine]. While Chernobyl remains a far greater disaster than Three Mile Island [1979], the new report estimates the eventual total death toll as a result of Chernobyl to be about 4,000 -- terrible, but far less devastating than the initial estimates (and some recent ones).

The current death toll from radiation since the event is 56 total: 47 emergency responders and 9 children who died of thyroid cancer. The rest of the predicted 3,940 deaths are supposed to occur over an indeterminate future interval, due to other types of cancer, almost all predicted to strike the emergency responders, not the local inhabitants. . .

The UN report emphasizes a factor that the anti-nuclear and other activist groups always ignore: the greatest threat from the Chernobyl accident, and even more so in the case of Three Mile Island earlier, was the fear factor, the "mental health impact," as the report terms it. Somewhere between 200,000 and 350,000 people were evacuated from the area over the subsequent years, although three out of four of the reactors resumed operation before the end of 1986. The earth and water near the facility were heavily contaminated, but again, the report noted that, for the overwhelming majority, stress and anxiety -- the fear of radiation effects, the loss of homes and livelihoods -- were more serious problems than the actual radiation."
Facts and Fears

There are a lot of people making a living by keeping us fearful about everything--going out at night, shampooing our hair, using deodorant, drinking tap water, using microwave ovens, pesticides and herbicides, airbags in automobiles, and yes, natural disasters. The Katrina disaster actually was tracked and predicted, both in the short term (last week of August 2005) and the long term (rerouting the Mississippi River, creating levees and destroying coastal areas). The city had dodged a bullet for 200 years. As has California and the "big one." If everyone had taken heed of all the reports and the money appropriated had actually been spent and not pocketed, apparently there would have been no New Orleans because that area would have been uninhabitable from the natural flooding and rehabilitated marshes. If they don't find thousands of bodies, if it turns out not to be the immediate death toll, the fear mongers will be coming at us with stats that will run the next 50 years for death and disease. They need us to be frightened, or they are out of work. Their jobs haven't been outsourced to China. . . yet.