Putting Risk in Perspective

Risk — we all know what the word means, but do we really know what it is?

Companies hire Risk Managers, Risk Assessors and Risk Analysts. Academic journals are devoted solely to risk issues. Scientists and researchers publish papers about scary new risks all the time. The government regularly comes out with new warnings about potential risks. And websites and blogs warn us of both real and imagined risks.

Wouldn't you think that all this focus on risk would make us safer? After all, if we know what the risks are, isn't it a lot easier to avoid, or at least reduce, them?

What I have found instead is that the near-constant drumbeat of risks just makes us more and more scared-often of things that may not really be risks at all. Or, we simply give up worrying altogether and end up ignoring real risks.

Take two examples from the medical world. First, think about the thousands of articles written about West Nile Virus-about 125 articles mentioned it just on Sept. 10-12, 2007. People fear that West Nile will kill thousands each year, but just 177 died from it in 2006. Contrast that with tuberculosis, which killed almost 1.7 million people in 2004 and was mentioned in fewer news articles (just 100) than West Nile was in the same time period.

Second, according to the Chicago Tribune, six percent of the 533 patients who decided to have their recalled defibrillators replaced over a 12-month period suffered major complications, including two deaths. In contrast, the risk of failure among those recalled defibrillators has been estimated by the manufacturers at just 0.009 percent to 2.6 percent. And not every failure is deadly. Even in the worst case scenario, the risk of defibrillator failure is less than half that of developing significant complications from replacing it.

Clearly we've lost all sense of proportion when it comes to risk. We hear so much sensational news about the latest terrible risk that no risk seems particularly worse than another. So we respond in three main ways. We focus on the little things and ignore the big things. We react (or over-react) to every risk and live our lives in fear. Or we take rash actions that we think will "fix" the risk, but we do not carefully consider the pitfalls or the costs of those fixes.

In a world where risk is everywhere, all the time, how does one decide which risks are real? Which are worth taking? And which are worth the costs associated with avoiding or preventing them?

The answer is not reading all the latest blogs and researching every website. Today, we have more information than ever before, yet we regularly worry about the wrong things. The answer is getting better, more trustworthy information that can aid us in making more intelligent decisions about risk.

Sound information would allow us to rationally answer questions like:

• Would it be better for the Transportation Security Administration to devote more resources to physical screening at airports or to increase behavioral screening?
• Is the cost of eliminating a tiny amount of a chemical from food or other consumer products justified given the minimal risk the chemical might pose to our health or the environment?
• Should I buy a smaller, lighter car to get better gas mileage or a larger, heavier car for better safety?

Author Ray Bradbury once said "Living at risk is jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down." As a society, we have become more afraid of twisting our ankles while walking toward the cliff before jumping off it than we are about actually jumping, even if we do not know how to build our wings. Our new-found, knee-jerk reluctance to take any action because something might go wrong or to spend scarce resources to eliminate small risks might be the biggest risk of all.