Life's risky but don't worry

This is a test of nerves. We are about to ingest 19 separate carcinogens,
each determined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be capable of
causing terminal disease and dire tumors.

We raise the drink to our lips, frothy, dark, smelly. Roger Bate and I pour
it down our gullets. We live. We talk for now.

``There are at least 1,000 chemicals in coffee, and 19 of the 27 that have
been tested are carcinogens,'' says Bate, an environmental economist. Every
time we eat, every time we breathe, he says, we're playing a giant game of
Russian roulette.

Whether you think this is just a foaming cappuccino or a soup of lethal
toxins depends entirely on your estimation of the risk. A collection of
learned scientists, professors of epidemiology, radiology, pharmacology,
and microbiology from the universities of Yale, Stockholm, Berkeley,
London, Harvard and Glasgow, have published an astonishing book, edited by
Bate.

What Risk? seems to show that our favorite phobias are either irrational or
exaggerated. Take passive smoking, now the subject of boundless litigation
and seen as so profound a social evil that most offices are now nogo areas
for smokers. It is true, say the scientists, that smoking gives you cancer,
and that passive smokers must ingest some carcinogens.

But what carcinogens do we mean? We mean polyaromatic hydrocarbons and
chemicals such as benzoapyrene. Well, they say, if you want to suck in some
serious benzoapyrene, stand anywhere near a grilling hamburger. The cooking
of bacon gives rise to the carcinogen nnitro pyrrolidine, more than you
could expect from passive smoking, and environmental tobacco smoke is
peanuts next to the potentially deadly vapor of the frankfurter.

``Peanut butter, lettuce, orange juice, black pepper, nutmeg, broccoli,
they are all carcinogens,'' says Bate.

If you really feel like living on the edge, eat a regular diet of Japanese
seafood rich in organic arsenate, which causes skin and bladder cancer.
It's the same substance, incidentally, that is found in tap water.

Does this mean you should lay off sushi or tap water? Of course not. It
means the risk must be kept in proportion.

If you want to see how risk becomes inflated, consider toxic shock syndrome.

Following speculation about dioxins in tampons, millions of women abandoned
tampons, says Bate.

Almost certainly irrationally, as he points out: " Forty per cent of toxic
shock cases are in men."

What about the billions that have been spent scarifying the heterosexual
population about AIDS?

Bate says the chances of catching AIDS in the course of unprotected sex
with a heterosexual partner who is not a drug user or prostitute are one in
five million.

On the other hand, the risk of any one individual dying playing soccer is a
comparatively terrifying one in 25,000; and the risk of dying in any one
year from flu is one in 850.

So why do we panic? The public's mind works in binary: yes, no, black,
white. Politicians and journalists tend to demand onearmed scientists,
with no ``on the one hand, on the other.''