Health News Can be Hazardous to Your Health

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15121

 

Health News Can be Hazardous to Your Health

 

By David French, AlterNet

February 6, 2003

 

And now the news: Pets Give Your Children Asthma; Not Having Pets Gives Your

Children Asthma; Cell Phones Cause Auto Accidents; Cell Phones Don't Cause Auto

Accidents, People Cause Auto Accidents; Biotech Corn Kills Butterflies; Biotech

Corn Found Harmless to Butterflies...

 

 

 

You've seen thousands of headlines like these – worrying, reassuring,

contradictory. How seriously do you take them? How seriously should you take

them?

 

 

 

When it comes to news about health – ours and the environment's – our

inclination is to believe what we're told. After all, professional journalists

quoting trained researchers are responsible for these stories. And we act on

what we hear: we quit smoking because of reports that cigarettes kill; we eat

high-fiber cereal because researchers say this reduces our risk of bowel cancer;

we use condoms because of what we've read about AIDS and bodily fluids. In

countless ways, how we judge what is good and bad for us is a function of what

we've seen in the media.

 

 

 

To let this happen may not always be a good idea, though. Health news passes

through many hands before it reaches you. With (or without) the best of

intentions, any of the people involved in this process – researchers,

manufacturers, experts, reporters, editors, headline writers – can deform what

you finally hear. This is equally true of the scary stories (pets give your

children asthma) and the reassuring ones (biotech corn doesn't hurt

butterflies). If you strip away the deformations, some of the scary stuff

becomes a lot less frightening; and much that seeks to reassure turns out to be

rather scary.

 

 

 

Start with the media's tendency to be alarmist: since they need to keep grabbing

your attention, their sky never stops falling. In case you weren't looking, here

are a few things they've reported recently: gardening can result in cognitive

dysfunction; lying makes your nose get longer (I'm not making that up);

ultrasound scans during pregnancy can make your baby left-handed; air

conditioning doubles the amount of pollution in the room; incense can give you

cancer. And it is always possible to find new risks in even the most familiar

dangers: in addition to giving you cancer, we're told, cigarettes can render you

impotent, hearing impaired, arthritic, infertile, toothless, and more likely to

be injured when you exercise. There's never a dearth of things to worry about.

 

 

 

I could go on and on, but the stories will keep coming. Dispiriting though all

this bad news may seem, it's simply a distillation of what we're constantly told

through TV and the press, as well as in material offered up by government

agencies, environmental and consumer interest groups, and medical journals. It's

enough to make you stay in bed with the covers over your head – except that bed

rest is bad for you and the covers are infested with dust mites.

 

 

 

How much of this should be taken at face value? There are reasons for concern.

The United States ranks only twenty-fourth among the world's nations in terms of

" healthy life expectancy " and fifty-first in terms of environmental health.

We're clearly doing something wrong. The good news, though, is that a lot of

things we're told to fear may not be so perilous after all. What you read is not

always what it seems to be.

 

 

 

In the interests of drama, for example, headlines often overstate the risk – or

at least what is really known about it. Take an alarming headline on the BBC Web

page, " Cancer Linked to Excess Light. " The article that follows, though, says

only that excess light " may " interfere with melatonin, which in seasonally

breeding animals, and perhaps in humans as well, affects the sex hormone

estrogen, which at elevated levels increases the risk of breast cancer. (Follow

that?) And headline writers are notoriously unable to tell people from rats: the

idea that " Diet in Early Pregnancy Affects Baby's Health in Later Life " is

surmised from experiments where female rats were fed low-protein diets for

several days after fertilization. In all these cases – and there are far too

many of them – the links between the stories and their summary headlines are

precarious.

 

 

 

If the headlines can be misleading, so can the stories themselves. A study of

childcare funded by the National Institutes of Health reported that children who

spend lots of time away from their mothers are much more likely to have

behavioral problems. The dramatic conclusion was that childcare causes bad

behavior. However, it is at least as plausible to think that children with

stressed parents or other serious problems are the ones most likely to end up in

childcare. If you're trying to decide whether to enroll your toddler in a

preschool program, what you heard about the childcare study could lead you

astray.

 

 

 

Limitations of this sort pervade most of the " observational " research you read

about, studies that are not controlled to isolate and test possible chains of

causality. Someone found not long ago that children who sleep in rooms with

night-lights are more likely to grow up myopic. After a period when everyone

switched their night-lights off, it turned out that myopic parents produce

myopic children and, because of their own myopia, are more likely to use

night-lights. Night-lights don't cause children's myopia; their parents do. When

stories like these hit the morning papers, though, the subtleties are likely to

be left behind.

 

 

 

Even if the lines of causality are clear, the risks can be exaggerated or taken

out of context. It sounds dramatic, for example, to report that tamoxifen, a

drug used to treat breast cancer, can itself cause cancer of the womb. To have

this effect requires long-term use of the drug, however, and studies show that

survival benefits exceed the risks. An uncircumcised man has a greater risk of

penile cancer, but this is in relation to an overall annual rate for such

cancers of only one man in 100,000. The stories are more dramatic without these

details, but the omissions can leave you on weak ground in making choices

affecting your health.

 

 

 

In one way or another, half the health news gets reduced to its scariest

possibilities in order to catch your eye. Since the process can be quite

misleading, you shouldn't panic too quickly at what you're told. It would be an

equal mistake to panic too slowly, though, since the other half of the news is

intended to tranquillize you.

 

 

 

When it comes to reassuring noises, the most obvious are those from sources with

a commercial interest to protect. When a study suggested that the use of

disposable diapers could lead to male infertility and testicular cancer, the

Personal Absorbent Products Council quickly provided reassurance that no such

thing could happen. The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association waves

away alarm over phone-related car accidents, suggesting that drivers who were

better educated about handling distractions wouldn't have those problems – and

anyway, " only " 3% of U.S. drivers are on their cell phones at any given moment.

The manufacturers could be right, but you might not want to relax too quickly.

 

 

 

In some cases, you have to dig to pin down the interests behind the story you're

reading. On its General Medicine page, for example, the (excellent) Web site

" Medscape.com " published a letter on research into the presence of mercury in

fish oil supplements. The doctor who had conducted the research reported that

" ...the common brands tested appear to offer no mercury risk. " As a

" Disclosure, " the doctor noted that he is " a stockholder in Vitacost.com who

helped support this study. " When I checked the Web page for Vitacost.com, they

proved to be selling at least 11 of the 13 " common brands " found free of mercury

by the study in question. The good doctor's science may be impeccable, but it is

hard to think of it as being disinterested. And this is hardly an isolated case:

the lack of any clear distinction between " expert " and " stockholder " has become

so entrenched that only one of America's top ten medical schools prevents its

researchers from having a financial interest in companies whose products they

are testing.

 

 

 

This has to affect what you hear. Would the stockholding doctor have published

his findings if they had showed traces of mercury in Vitacost.com's products? We

can only speculate. In a comparable case, though, The Journal of the American

Medical Association found that a drug company withheld the results of research

on a new product when tests showed it to be ineffective. To ensure that articles

say the right thing, companies may simply ghostwrite research reports and then

pay scientists to sign their names to them. Manipulation of research by the

prescription drug industry is so extensive that the British medical journal

Lancet has editorialized about the " lethal extent " of attempts by drug companies

" to suppress, spin, and obfuscate findings that do not suit their commercial

purposes. "

 

 

 

Rather than watching over this process to protect your interests, the media are

often willing accomplices. According to a report in The New England Journal of

Medicine, more than half of news reports on new drugs neglected to mention their

risks, 61% of stories citing experts with financial ties to a drug maker failed

to reveal those links, and 40% of stories left out important information such as

the actual risk of getting the disease the drug was designed to cure. What you

are reading is often what the journalists learned from company press releases,

as interpreted by " experts " owning stock in the company or employed by it. It

may be no coincidence that drug advertising is a major source of media revenue:

the drug companies increased spending on advertising from $266 million in 1994

to nearly $2.5 billion in 2000, and now employ 81% more people in marketing than

in research.

 

 

 

It's not only drug dangers that the media can wave aside. In a report on

genetically modified corn, for example, The New York Times headlined: " Biotech

Corn Isn't Serious Threat to Monarchs, Draft US Report Finds. " (They had

butterflies in mind, not kings and queens.) In the article's lead paragraph,

" isn't a serious threat " became " unlikely to pose a serious threat. " In the

story itself, it turned out that certain biotech crops probably were dangerous

to monarch butterflies, that new information on the dangers had appeared since

the report had been written, and that the report itself was missing half the

research its sponsors had requested in order to assess the risk. At every point

in summarizing the information, from story to lead to headline, the Times had

applied a soothing hand, easing the burden of your worry about monarchs.

 

 

 

When the news is obviously pitched to wind you up or calm you down, at least you

know where you stand. Things get more complicated when the factual ground starts

to shift beneath your feet. People who are left-handed die nine years earlier

than people who are right-handed – or is it 3.7 years earlier? (I can cite

studies proving both.) Depending on which stories you read, having cats or other

pets can give your children asthma or keep them from getting it. The Journal of

the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology reported that farm

women exposed to pesticides may have an increased risk for breast cancer, while

a study by the Yale Cancer Center found no such link. In each case, it is safe

to assume that at least one of the contradictory stories is wrong – if not both.

You can look at these inconsistencies with wry amusement – unless, of course,

you're a farm woman handling pesticides, in which case you may want to know

more.

 

 

 

The sum of all these forces is unsettling. If you're not simply confused by what

you read, you're likely to end up fearing things that don't much matter, while

remaining indifferent about things that do. You can become paranoid about

night-lights, while waving away the possible dangers of things like prescription

drugs, cell phones, disposable diapers, biotechnology, or pesticides. If there

are specific risks about which you need to know the truth, you'll have to do

your own research.

 

 

 

There's no shortage of material. As a start, you can go to an Internet search

engine like Google (www.google.com), enter the issue you're concerned about, and

prepare to scroll through 784,312 relevant Web pages. Newspapers' Web sites can

be helpful, as can specialist sites such as Medscape, newswise,%20Science News

Online or InteliHealth. Useful magazines and journals include Scientific

American, the

journal%20of%20the%20american%20medical%20association%20and%20the%20British

Medical Journal.

 

 

 

Government agencies are a basic source of information: see, for example, the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Product Safety

Commission, or the Medline Plus feature of the National Institutes of Health.

Independent organizations with useful points of view include the Center for

Science in the Public Interest and Public Interest Research Groups.

 

 

 

Don't believe everything you read, though. As we've seen, even the most

respectable sources can draw sweeping conclusions from limited or ambiguous

information, get the facts wrong, imply incorrectly that one thing causes

another just because both happen at the same time, be contradicted by other

stories, leave out vital background material, rely on research or comment by

parties with a financial interest in what's being reported, or simply reflect

bias (whether conscious or not) on the part of writers and editors. If you are

trying to determine what is genuinely bad for you, you have to read widely

enough to find for yourself the reality behind the distortions. Anything short

of this can be hazardous to your health.

 

 

 

David French is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times

Magazine, Commonweal, World Development, BlueEar.com and other publications. His

book, " Everything is Bad for You, " is available online and in bookstores

everywhere.

 

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