What are you scared of?

REMEMBER all those food scares which had our politicians in a spin in the late 1980s and 90s? First there was Edwina Currie’s great panic over salmonella in eggs, followed by the “listeria hysteria” which almost closed down one well-known cheesemaker in Scotland.

Then in 1996 came the most expensive food scare of them all, when the government claimed there might be a link between so-called “mad cow disease” (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) and new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans. This brought Britain’s beef industry to its knees, prompted our worst-ever row with our EU partners and left us all with a bill for £7 billion.
Looking back, I would say that none of these episodes should have taken place, and that they were all based on some fundamental misreading of the scientific evidence, which tugged the politicians in its wake – and each in turn caused untold unnecessary havoc at grotesquely disproportionate cost.

But this was not the half of it. Over the past 20 years we have seen so many other supposed threats to our health or well-being floating in and out of the headlines – often costing us infinitely more than those famous food scares – that most people are probably not even aware just how baseless many of them turned out to be.

One exception, which everyone can, with the benefit of hindsight, see had become absurdly exaggerated, was that famous “Millennium Bug” which, we were told, would at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1999, causing half the world’s computers to crash, bringing economies to a halt and making airplanes fall out of the sky. Although the experts, supported by Tony Blair, predicted that it would cost $300 billion (£150 billion) to avert the end of world civilisation, when that midnight came virtually nothing happened other than an alarm sounding in a Japanese power station and a few gambling machines going on the blink in Delaware.

Having watched the unfolding of many such scares over the years, I have just published, with Dr Richard North, a book called Scared to Death, which shows how they all tend to follow a remarkably consistent pattern.

Although many such examples of scares begin with some genuine problem, what turns them into a fully fledged crisis is when some supposed expert or scientist fatally misreads the evidence. In Britain in the 1980s, there was a sudden explosion in food-poisoning figures. But the wrong turning was taken when a top government scientist theorised that the prime cause of this was salmonella from chickens getting into eggs.

A second factor usually crucial in promoting any full-blown scare is excitable attention from those sections of the media who cannot wait to talk up the supposed threat without properly checking the facts.

The third factor, what we call the “tipping point”, is when a scare is taken up by the politicians – as when the theory about salmonella and eggs was adopted by an ambitious junior health minister called Edwina Currie. One ill-judged statement from her during a television interview sent the egg scare into orbit.

This official acceptance of the scare then produces the political response – invariably out of all proportion to the reality of the threat – which is what causes the real damage, leaving us all to pay an often quite astronomic bill.

One of the oddest scares we describe in the book was that hysteria which 20 years began to grip many of our social workers, based on the belief that large numbers of children were being subjected to ritual or “Satanic” abuse by groups of adults. In communities in Nottingham, Rochdale, Orkney and elsewhere this led to chilling human tragedies, until eventually the madness ran its course.

Most of the scares we analyse, however, originate in some fundamental scientific misjudgment, which usually springs from putting two things together and guessing, wrongly, that one was linked to the other.

The cause of the rise in salmonella poisoning, as even the government itself was eventually forced to concede, was not eggs. When the government’s top scientific adviser on BSE, Dr John Pattison, launched the vCJD scare on its way, he was prepared to predict that eating beef might before long kill half a million people. Barely a year later he had reduced his estimate to just 200 – eating beef was not the cause of vCJD after all.

Everyone was shocked by the revelation that the pesticide DDT was causing immense damage to wildlife. Where this turned into a scare, however, was when it was wrongly suggested that DDT could also cause cancer in humans. The resulting ban, depriving the Third World of its most effective protection against malaria, may have led, it has been estimated, to as many as 50 million unnecessary deaths.

Some of the most damaging scares of recent times have been those where the scientific evidence has not just been misread, but so manipulated and distorted by pressure groups that the eventual political response went completely over the top.

One disturbing instance of how science got twisted out of all relation to the facts was the way fanatical pressure groups managed to demonise “passive smoking”. The two most comprehensive scientific studies ever carried out both concluded there was no evidence to show that smoking seriously damages the health of anyone except the smokers themselves.

Another example of scientific manipulation is the story behind the wholly unnecessary demonising of lead in petrol, costing many billions of pounds.

Even more shocking is the story of how a confusion between two completely different minerals, just because they are both known under the same unscientific name of “asbestos”, set off two colossal scams which have cost us all even more.

One form of asbestos was found to be genuinely a killer – but this then became confused with another type, called “white asbestos”, which represents more than 90 per cent of all asbestos-containing materials and poses no measurable threat to human health. Yet, thanks to this confusion being enshrined in the law, compensation lawyers and a new army of “licensed asbestos-removal contractors” have been able to rip off the public on both sides of the Atlantic to the tune of billions of pounds.

What has become easily the greatest and most costly scare of all is, however, I think, the belief in man-made climate change to which our politicians are now responding with an avalanche of policies. These threaten to cost us trillions of pounds, not to mention covering vast areas of the incomparable Scottish landscape with expensive and wholly useless wind turbines.

The fear of global warming has been promoted over the past 20 years with the aid of more distorted and politicised science than all the other scares put together. However sincerely our politicians may have been persuaded to believe in it, even they might be disturbed by our evidence of just how neatly their obsession fits the pattern of so many other scares before it, most of them long since discredited.

I will, however, end on one point which may offer some crumb of consolation. Such is the power of all these scares, that I raised the question of how we can find a way better to protect ourselves against them. There is precious little hope in looking to our politicians for the intelligence and robust common sense that is needed, because again and again they have shown themselves as gullible over scares as anyone.

Just occasionally, however, a scare has been tested in the courts in front of judges who proved immune to the general hysteria – and four admirable examples of this independence of mind singled out in our book involved sheriffs and the Scottish judicial system.

When Orkney social workers presented to show that Orcadian parents had been guilty of ritually abusing their children, unlike some of his counterparts south of the Border, Sheriff David Kelbie chucked out their case as wholly implausible. When Sheriff Douglas Allan heard Clydesdale environmental health officers arguing that Lanark Blue cheese (made from unpasteurised milk) must be destroyed because it contained supposedly deadly listeria, he grasped the point made by expert defence witnesses that almost all blue cheese relies on listeria for its ripening. All that mattered was whether the bacteria found in the cheese was of a strain which could harm human health. Since it wasn’t, he saved one of Scotland’s most prestigious cheese businesses from bankruptcy.

When Sheriff Graham Cox heard the sorry tale of how a butcher’s shop in Wishaw had become riddled with deadly E coli bacteria, he homed in on the question of how hygiene standards in the shop could have fallen so low when it was being regularly inspected by supposedly expert public health officials. Did not the blame attach as much to them as to the butcher himself?

Finally, in 1998, it took a devastating judgment by Sheriff James Paterson to overturn one of the maddest laws produced by any scare: the ban on selling beef on the bone which grew out of the panic over BSE.

From our disillusioning experience of the willingness of too many English judges to uphold stupid, scare-driven laws and to accept unquestioningly the evidence presented to them by officials, Scotland’s record – at least in these cases – shines out by comparison. It may not be enough to protect us from the general madness of our age, but at least it is something.

• Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming, Why Scares are Costing us the Earth by Christopher Booker and Richard North is published by Continuum (£16.99).