The True Race Card. When People Are "Under-Reacting" to Risk. This is the fifth in a series of risk communication columns I have been asked to write for The Synergist, the journal of the American Industrial Hygiene Association.
The columns appear both in the journal and on this web site. This column appears (more or less identical except for copyediting details) in the July 2004 issue of The Synergist, pp. 24–25. Facing Public Outrage PDF (Peter M. Sandman website) If you make a list of environmental risks in order of how many people they kill each year, then list them again in order of how alarming they are to to the general public, the two lists will be very different.
The first list will also be very debatable, of course; we don’t really know how many deaths are attributable to, say, geological radon or toxic wastes. But we do know enough to be nearly certain that radon kills more Americans each year than all our Superfund sites combined. Yet, as Milton Russell points out (see preceding article), millions who choose not to test their homes for radon are deeply worried about toxic wastes.