Ben goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 6 March 2010
If the media were actuarial about drawing our attention to the causes of avoidable death, your newspapers would be filled with diarrhoea, Aids, and cigarettes every day. In reality we know this is an absurd idea. For those interested in the scale of our fascination with rarity, one piece of research looked at a 3 month period in 2002 and found that 8,571 people had to die from smoking to generate one story on the subject from the BBC, while there were 3 stories for every death from vCJD. Read the rest of this entry »
