Origins of Radiation Phobia

The Origins of Radiation Phobia

Introduction

Armed with a fundamental knowledge of radiation, the nature of low dose radiation, the relative safety of low dose radiation and some idea of the huge influence an individual’s perception plays in how we respond to risks, we’ll now look at how America came to be so radiation phobic.  First I’ll cover the general culture of fear in the United States, and then proceed on to other topics.

 

Fear in America

“People react to fear, not love.  They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.”  Richard Nixon.

Fear, like risk, is something few of us consciously analyze.  We take it for granted that our fears are logical, and everybody is pretty much afraid of the same things.  This is not true. 

Americans have a relatively unique national approach to fear, which has changed rather significantly in the past 100 years.  As Peter Stearns points out in his book, American Fear, this change is associated with changes in how we raise our children, our national media, how we spend our money and how we react as a nation to various threats.  It is closely tied to how we perceive various risks in our lives.  And, many agencies, especially advertising and political ones, have learned to manipulate our fears thereby producing internal anxiety we may not be aware of, motivating us to follow their lead.  As Barry Glassner said in The Culture of Fear, “immense power and money” await those who tap into these fears.

Stearns notes that in the past 100 years there have been dramatic improvements in our health and lives.  The average life span has doubled.  As many as 30% of children used to die before reaching maturity, now the death of a child is unusual.  Yet, more Americans are worried about their health than ever before.  Our children live longer, and obviously have fewer real risks, and yet we fear for them constantly.  A century ago children were exposed to many risks, and parents accepted this as part of the challenge of life.  Being exposed to fear was part of growing up, and dealing with those fears made you braver, more courageous and stronger. 

Slowly, in the mid twentieth century, we began to shield our children from fear and the anxiety it produced.  The process has gotten so extreme; we now have “helicopter parents” who watch everything their child does, lest they be scared by some real or imagined risk. 

Stearns uses the following example to make this point.

“Curious George, a reasonably popular book series for young children that began in the late 1940s, was written by immigrants from Germany (H.A. Rey and his wife Margret).  The initial stories involve George, an irrepressible monkey, getting into all sorts of terrifying situations: he’s kidnapped, jailed in a dark prison infested with mice, trapped in a helium balloon, falls off a skyscraper and breaks a leg (“he got what he deserved,” a callous bystander remarks) amid other mishaps, all of which he manages to endure with reasonably good spirits after initial fear. 

The Reys, Jewish refugees (H. A. Rey himself was a German army veteran of World War 1), began their writing in Europe and reflected a European sense that children could be exposed to frightening images without damage to their psyches, indeed perhaps with some benefit in terms of thinking about how they would handle fear in real life.  But while the initial books in the series sold well enough to maintain publisher interest, the tone was antithetical to the changing culture developing for young American children—where, according to adults at least, fear-producing situations should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible.  This impulse had already been amply displayed from the 1930s onward, in the Disney-ed dilutions of traditional folk tales like Cinderella (where the evil stepsisters originally suffered brutal physical punishments), and now it applied to the curious monkey.  By the fourth book in the series, issued in 1952, George no longer gets into scary adventures, and he’s surrounded by loving, supportive human beings who carefully supervise his activities so that he won’t encounter trouble.  By the fifth book in the series, the Reys actually yielded to psychological and pediatric experts on the publisher’s staff, which further reduced the opportunity for any emotionally challenging adventure.  George himself becomes anxious, eager to stay around home for the sake of safety.  (Also, the vocabulary was dumbed down, in response to findings that children were not capable of handling many words, but that’s another story.)  When anything untoward does occur, George becomes immediately frightened and vows never to court danger again.  As his surrogate human father figure intones, “I was scared, and you must have been scared too.  I know you will not want to fly a kite again for a long, long time.”  Fear still occurs, but obviously it is now irredeemably bad, and sensible people (and humanoid monkeys) will avoid its risk at all costs.  And children, as personified by George, are themselves easily frightened, deserving all possible reassurance and protection instead of nonchalance (the dominant motif in the original books of the series) or injunctions toward courage.  Fear will occur in childhood—the last George book was designed to reassure children facing hospitalization—but it should be minimized as much as possible, surrounded by maximum reassurance and support—a set of lessons that might teach some children that the emotion was not only unpleasant but undeserved, and that sources of fear should be removed or punished.”

This change in our approach to fear in childhood has paralleled changes in adults, both as parents teaching this to children, and as these children have grown up.  Recently, some colleges have had to add adult only sessions to their freshman orientation programs, so hovering parents would not attend the student programs with their children.  Adults, less accustomed since childhood to dealing with the anxiety produced by fear, make the perfect target for those who want to manipulate us using fear.

Our nation, and most of us as individuals, has limited resources.  Where we commit our time, energy and money is a choice we make constantly.  There is no shortage of groups, organizations, parties, companies or individuals who want to be on the receiving end of those resources.  In the past century, the exploitation of fear has become one of the prime tools of those who want your resources.

News used to be reported factually, with very little emotional embellishment.  Now, most stories of bad events are accompanied with personal emotions from the reporter or the anchor, “How tragic” or “that is really frightening.”  Can you imagine Walter Cronkite every saying something akin to “it makes me want to go home and hug my little girl” after reporting a story?  Tragic, but thankfully rare events like a plane crash or a high school shooting are presented in terms that make us think it could happen to us or our children tomorrow.  The media know that fear sells papers (and magazines, TV viewers, etc.).  They know which buttons to press.

Businesses and government agencies, both of which see growth and larger budgets as signs of success, have learned to profit from increasing fear.  In the 90s, when the illegal use of drugs was actually declining, why did adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to American youth?  We annually spend billions on the “drug war”, much to the delight of enforcement agencies and their suppliers.  Drug abuse is a serious problem in America, one that deserves our attention.  Our media are filled with stories of the victims of drug abuse-- teenage lives wasted, crack babies in our slums.  Every parent worries that their child may fall victim to illicit drugs.  And, that is where the money is directed, the drug war against illegal drugs.  Unfortunately, the majority of drug related deaths and medical problems are from the illegal use of prescription drugs.  Less than 1% of the “Drug war” funds are spent on this problem.  Maybe it is coincidence that TV news networks, which make millions off ads for Viagra and other prescriptions drugs, seldom show scary footage of this problem, but love to show large scale drug busts and raids.  How many of us “fear” the drugs in our medicine cabinet the way we do illegal drugs.

It is paradoxical that as our risk of dying has gone down, our fear of dying seems to be increasing.  Because we expect to live longer and healthier, we now look for a cause, often a person or man-made source, to be blamed for our decline or demise.  Natural carcinogens in food vastly outnumber synthetic ones, but we fear and regulate the man-made substances far more.  Obviously, organic farmers want you to feel this way.  Various environmental groups also play on this fear, encouraging you to give them money to fight this risk.  I certainly don’t want unnecessary chemicals in my food, but if a substance is truly useful, the fact that it causes tumors in mice at 100,000 times the daily human dose needs to be weighed objectively, not with a blanket ban.  Coffee contains 19 known natural carcinogens.  Are you scared to drive into Starbucks?  Every get any junk mail asking for your support in the fight against coffee?

Cancer is a terrible disease.  It seems that more of us are dying from cancer than ever before.  This is true, because one, cancer increases with age and we are living longer, and two, smoking.  Excluding the effects of cigarettes, the age adjusted rate of cancer is decreasing in the US.   The “War on Cancer” is huge.  Every type of cancer has its own advocacy group, encouraging more support for their form of cancer.  This is understandable, and certainly how I would respond when faced with such a terrible personal challenge.  But, there is a constant advertising battle in an effort to encourage you to support cause X, instead of Y or Z.  

As I have mentioned before, I do a lot of work with mammography and breast cancer.  Good studies and my own experience have shown that many women believe their risk of dying from breast cancer is 1 out of 9.  The risk of getting breast cancer is around 1 in 9; the risk of dying from breast cancer is only 1 in 35.  Where did this discrepancy come from?  The early promotions for mammography prominently displayed the 1 out of 9 phrase.  These ads, meant to encourage mammography (a good thing) actually helped instill an exaggerated fear of breast cancer in many women.  Many would say, “The more women fear breast cancer the better.  That is how we can win this struggle.  What’s wrong with that?”  As a mammographer, I like this approach, but the resulting disproportionate research spending on breast cancer, which can only come at the expense of research on other cancers, is not completely justified.

 Fear mongering on the part of the media constantly adds to our fears, and changes our lives.  When a child is abducted, it is all over national news—a very good thing if it helps get that child home.  Child abduction by strangers is actually very rare, but the inflamed coverage makes it feel like each incident is occurring in your own neighborhood.  In 1982 there were widely publicized reports of poison and razor blades in Halloween candy, although no cases were ever really documented.  Do you know personally anyone who has been a victim of these two forms of malice?  Very few of us do, because these kinds of events are so rare.  Yet we fear them, and most of us follow our kids around on Halloween night, if we let them trick-or-treat at all, because of such fears.

In the 80s, a lot of people and organizations received significant money and press (Jane Fonda and Greenpeace come to mind) opposing nuclear energy.  They conjured up images of nuclear explosions, reactor melt downs and radioactive contamination which were entirely unrealistic.  The nation responded to this fear, and nuclear energy fell by the wayside.  Greenpeace has grown significantly since then, and we’ll talk more about them later.  Jane Fonda’s movie career didn’t exactly soar, but she got very fit, and she married well.

 

Summing up this section, another quote from Peter Stearns is pertinent.

“Fear has two major consequences, derived from its primal function in readying the body for flight from danger.  First, even when it does not provoke outright flight, it stimulates unusual attentiveness to the surroundings, an awareness of possible threat.  Fear, in this instantiation, warns.  It can be immensely constructive.  But second, fear’s emotional intensity—again, when literal flight is not possible—can cloud rational judgment, provoking exaggerations of the perceptions of danger in ways that not only increase personal discomfort far beyond any objective necessity but also lead to an acceptance of responses that may distract from real needs or even exacerbate danger.  Fear, in this second form, misleads, sometimes quite seriously.  It promotes a generalized level of anxiety that is distracting at best, positively counterproductive at worst.”

Most people fear radiation.  The emotional intensity this fear provokes is far disproportionate to the actual risk.  Our government is spending billions of dollars regulating and protecting us from this minimal risk.  If we had unlimited resources this waste wouldn’t matter, but we don’t.  We need to get a handle on this fear.  In the next few pages we’ll examine more specifically the roots of our fear of radiation.