You know what I'm starting to find fascinating by this whole debate is the whole risk perception, communication of risks and trust issue behind this issue. No doubt there must be a few profs rubbing their hands in anticipation of papers, funding for thesis that'll be published on this.
What I'd be interested to see is a comparison of individuals and their trust levels of the risk communciated by one organisation (the WHO) that is made of an international collaboration of expert scientists and compare that trust level with that of another international organisation that again is made of a international collaboration of expert scientists ... namely the IPCC whose finding and suggestions I've often read on this site being dismissed as nothing more than doom and gloom fear-mongering.
Playing devils advocate here but it's not as if the WHO hasn't been known to be guilty of a bit of doom and gloom in the past also.
I mean both organisations monitor, measure and record present/past and projected future happenings for risk management albeit on completely different timeline. Is it the timelines (50 years) into the future that people have a problem with re. trusting the message delivered by the IPCC vs WHO or is there something else?
Quote:
Meantime, a lot of people have said the hell with it. It's hard to blame them. Ever since the spring, when the World Health Organization declared swine flu to be a “pandemic” – after just 144 deaths – SFO has been running rampant. Ordinary pandemics kill at least a million people worldwide. Swine flu has killed around 5,000 people, including 86 in Canada. Worldwide, ordinary seasonal flu kills 700 to 1,400 people a day.
But everybody loves a good health scare. Remember BSE? Infected cows were going to turn our brains to mush. Then came SARS. In 2003, one widely quoted British expert predicted that it could turn out to be more lethal than AIDS. The final death toll from SARS was 774 – about one day's worth of flu victims. Then came deadly birds. In 2006, David Nabarro, a top WHO official, warned that avian flu could kill 150 million people. The White House's avian flu response plan projected that as many as two million Americans might die, and one leading influenza researcher warned that a pandemic might kill half the human population. To date, the worldwide death toll from avian flu is 262.
All these panics have a lot in common: a legitimate concern that's blown wildly out of proportion by various interest groups, including scientists and public-health agencies, whose warnings are then amplified by the media. Politicians have no choice but to respond in kind, just in case. This outbreak has followed the usual course. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently predicted that there might be 30,000 to 90,000 U.S. deaths from swine flu, peaking in mid-October. (That would be a week ago.) To date the U.S. death toll has barely reached a thousand, but the President has declared a national emergency anyway.
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