Cancer

In my previous post, I talked about the situation in which facts about risk are wrongly communicated to the public. In the following post, I would like to elaborate upon some of the possible issues that can result from biased media messages. With the HIV story, we can imagine that not much harm has been done when the risk was inadequately presented. Since the vaccination is not yet available, risky behaviour won't be affected by the perception of its effect. The worst that can happen is that people will have high hopes for the cure to be developed soon. Of course, it doesn't have to be such a bad thing as it can motivate people to donate and approve HIV research even more when they see some progress.

Unfortunately, not always "risk miscommunication" is so harmless. I would like to use another example, the news about the death of Natalie Morton. As you may remember, the very first coverage about this case was presented with headlines like:

-"Cancer jab alert after girl dies" BBC

-"Cancer jabs suspended after death" BBC

-"Schoolgirl, 14, dies after being given cervical cancer jab" Daily Mail

-"Schoolgirl Natalie Morton, 14, Dies After Having Cervical Cancer Jab" Sky News

At the time when these were published, I was truly shocked with the complete lack of responsibility shown by the media. It was only in the first paragraph of each of the articles where the information about the complete lack of evidence for the link between the death and jabs was presented. In other words, the information from headlines was in-congruent with the content of the actual article in all cases.

Following the introduction of the cervical cancer vaccinations, occurrences of the disease dropped by 70%. This means that from around 3 000 cases in the whole of UK before the vaccine was available, only 682 were registered after the vaccine was introduced. Bear in mind that we are talking about the relative risk reduction here. Since about 1 out of 3 women die from the cancer when she gets it, we can expect that 227 (682/3) will die instead of a 1000, thanks to the vaccinations in UK.

Now, following the publications of the media many parents decided to withdraw their consent to have their children vaccinated. The probability of dying from a jab is .000001% (1 in a million or maybe even less), while the chance of dying from the cancer if not vaccinated is .00003% (1000 out of around 30 million women in UK), that is about 33 women per 1 million... Since the vaccination lowers deaths by 60-70%, for each life lost due to the adverse reaction to the vaccination, 25 lives are saved from the cancer's death toll.

Although it is obvious that everyone should still be vaccinated, harm was already done as some parents withdrew their consent.

To sum up in harsh but true words: The information presented in news headlines was untrue and imagined. It created an "out of proportion" belief that a cancer jab can lead to death which in turn resulted in less people getting vaccinated. At the end of the day we can expect slightly more deaths from the cancer thanks to the media's miscommunication of risk...

Personally, I would be much more concerned with the risk of dying in a car crash on my way to get a vaccination...

Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Reckoning with Risk.

London: Penguin Group