Bin Laden Advertising

Bin Laden must be laughing with glee and dancing the Taliban jig. He listens to our news and hears reporters struggling to find the next thing that will make us even more paranoid. It is the duty of the news to keep us informed, they say, but when there aren't enough anthrax cases or other sensational violence to occupy them, you hear them in their attempt to get you to tune in to a future broadcast: "Is your workplace secure? Does your workplace have air filtration that will filter out anthrax spores or other biological weapons? Does your workplace have security that will prevent …? Is your water supply secure? Is that white powder on your child's face really from a donut? What biological weapons should you be protected against?"

Give me a break. The news media have managed to create a run on antibiotics that, if taken unnecessarily, will do more harm than good. People are taking them because they have been coerced into fearing a possibility that has minute odds of occurring. Listen to the news. They hype all possible attacks coming from all possible directions. Is this to help us or to make sure that we stay tuned? But that is their duty.

Police, doctors, the FBI, and more are wasting time dealing with a media-generated paranoia. Yes, some insane, cowardly wackos have sent anthrax through the mail. They will undoubtedly be found and dealt with. Meanwhile, national resources are spread thin—responding to some of the dumbest things made rational by the news reports. Does the thought of three or four people dying scare you? How about a thousand people dying? How about 70 thousand lives? Would you want to prevent it? Saving lives does not make for nightly sensational news, so it's unlikely that they will be saved. If you are justifiably concerned that you might be one of the 70 thousand, read on.

Part Two

How about more than 200 people dying each day—70 thousand people dying this year—when it could have been prevented if the same manpower that is being spent on false alarms was spent on productive work. Bin Laden does not have to wage biowarfare on us; we are doing a fine job all by ourselves.

Both breast and prostrate cancer rates are increasing. A woman in the U.S. has an eight to ten times greater chance of getting breast cancer than a woman in Japan. The same factor can be used for men and prostate cancer, I'm told. Japanese who come to the U.S. become subject to the U.S. rates. The Cancer Society estimates that in the U.S. in 2001, over 40 thousand women will die of breast cancer and over 39 thousand men from prostate cancer. That means that in the United States this year, we will have killed about 70 thousand people from those two cancers alone, because of something that we are probably putting into our bodies from food or water and possibly our air.

If you look at the cancer incidence breakdown by states, you will see that if you live in Connecticut you live in a really good area if your goal is getting prostate or breast cancer. Actually, it seems that Connecticut is a national leader for both breast and prostate cancer productivity.

What would it cost to do a couple of studies to isolate the variables between Japan and here? Alabama is really low for the U.S. in those two cancers. What is different there? It wouldn't take rocket science to find out. How much would it cost to send questionnaires to 80 thousand people—the families of U.S. victims—to find out key items about diet and general environment? How much would it cost to find out what dietary changes the Japanese victims in the U.S. have made? I'm told that the problem of defining significant variables is complex. Yes, making up a good, effective questionnaire would not be a five-minute job, but it is easily within our capability. Most studies that I have seen were done to prove some point, so although there may be some numerical correlation between beef consumption and some forms of cancer, the cause may not be the cow itself. Do the benefits of using known carcinogens to facilitate the production of food outweigh the possible undesirable effects?

"The FDA has approved …"

But girls are having periods and growing breasts at a younger age, and people are growing at different rates than before. Is it environmental or chemical? We are tampering with our food and water supply and we really have no good idea of what the ultimate result will be in 20, 30 or 40 years. What we can prove is that various cancers are on the increase, and we are a world leader in their production.

Increased security at airports will save how many lives and cost how much? We will kill far more people all by ourselves in one year with just two cancers than bin Laden could ever hope to kill in the next five years with plane hijackings. The odds of one of those two cancers getting you are far greater than of you being killed in an aircraft hijacking with all security removed, or by anthrax sent in the mail.

I wonder if any of the media moguls have stock in the companies that make the antibiotics that we are told are so necessary to treat whatever we are told to fear. They would be foolish not to. Think hard: Could proper reporting help our economy stay stable? If the right positive things were hyped on the news, we could live in a really neat world. But it wouldn't be sensational enough to stay tuned for.