Paranoia

I'm not usually in the habit of taking photos of people on buses, but this woman was different.
There's currently lots int he news about this avian flu business, however I still haven't seen proof that it has made the leap from infecting birds to infecting humans. This person seems to think differently!
I wasn't living in London at the time of SARS, but that seemed to be another media fuelled scare story. By coincidence, I was reading an amusing story in the Guardian. It was making an extremely valid and relevant point about the BSE scares of the early and mid 1990s. There were predictions of seeing millions of people die from a disease that could cross the boundaries between Human physiology and Cow physiology.
So far, at least, this hasn't proven to be the case. When was the last time you heard of a new case of CJD being diagnosed?
I remember stories focusing on kids who used to eat beef every single day catching this horrific disease.
Mobile phones causing cancer is another of those scare stories, that is just beginning to fade. MMR vaccines is one of the few scare stories that actually got proven wrong during the 'scare cycle.'
The only real solution to this kind of nonsense is some kind of mandatory comparison of risks people have to take, some kind of benchmark risk. How about the likelihood of being run over for someone who lives in London and crosses the road twice each day.
It would be scary in itself to see the number of scare stories that don't succeed in being more deadly than that (I cross the road at least 10 times a day in my commute to work...)