Life’s a risky business, so protect yourself by properly assessing danger

THE mayor of New York had a specific audience in mind. That audience was made up of Jimmy Buffet’s “tourists covered with oil”: holiday-makers on the beaches.

Catching the rays. Dancing in and out of the cool seawater with their children. Building sand-castles. Eating sandwiches with the distinctive crunch provided by invasive grains of sand. Gathering shells. Capturing happiness in photographs. Doing all the sweet, timeless, idyllic things families have always done in late summer warmth.

The only exceptional factor was that a hurricane was lashing up the eastern coastline of the United States of America, and this was no secret. This tropical storm had been around for a while, building through the categories from mild to lethal out at sea. They’d even given it a name: Irene.

Long before Irene made it to the Carolinas, President Barack Obama had gravely warned people to believe in the seriousness of the threat she posed. Airlines such as Aer Lingus had cancelled flights. Airlines such as JetBlue had done much more than cancel flights. They had embarked on a massive evacuation. Of hardware. As in planes. Because, however massive a passenger jet looks on the ground, when Mother Nature arrives in the form of her daughter, Irene, a plane becomes a Lego plaything to hurl around the tarmac. JetBlue shifted its machinery to Florida.

This was not a situation where anybody could later whinge that “nobody told me”. Everybody was told. Repeatedly. Think letters a foot high. Yet there they were on the sand, the oiled-up thousands, as if nothing untoward were about to happen. Don’t worry. Be happy.

The mayor did not say: “Are you out of your minds, you irresponsible lot?” He just told them to get off the beaches, quickly.

He did not say that them getting off the beaches so late would unnecessarily add to traffic congestion as the state grappled with keeping its people as safe as possible. That was obvious. But, then, the threat itself had been obvious and was ignored. One radio reporter in New York put his finger on the irrationality of this behaviour. This man was in the front line of incoming information, presumably, as all reporters do these days, drawing data from the radio, the telly, Facebook, Twitter and a multiplicity of news sites. Yet, he confessed, it wasn’t until he heard that the New York underground was shutting down that he realised how serious was the threat.

It’s the great unaddressed human deficit: our chronic inability to measure risk in a rational way. The evidence is all around us, every day. Survey children and the findings will reveal that they’re frightened of bears and dragons. Now, nobody of any age wants to cuddle up to a bear unless it’s a stuffed toy, and anything that spits fire should be avoided at all times, but let’s be honest, how real is the possibility that any six-year-old will encounter a black, brown or polar bear on the way to school?

Adults are equally irrational. We all know people who avoid flying and, when it becomes an inevitability, can get themselves down that airbridge only by being drugged to the gills on tranquillisers plus alcohol.

If it’s explained to them that their chances of being killed or maimed are much higher when they slip into the driver’s seat of a car than when they belt themselves in to seat 18G of an Airbus, they acknowledge the fact but can’t kick the terror. One air-phobic I know maintains that she deliberately doesn’t listen to the safety instructions delivered by the cabin staff before the plane takes off because they frighten her even more.

The problem with that chosen ignorance is that, in the event of an air accident, people who have not worked out precisely where their seat is, relative to the nearest emergency exit, are likely to freeze in situ if the plane comes down where it shouldn’t come down. Because they have not taught themselves to assess and manage the risk, they may — bluntly — die.

Failure to understand risk can kill in all sorts of situations. It’s not today nor yesterday that the RSA began producing evidence that alcohol causes car crashes. They’ve been generous with objective, provable data as long as they’ve been in existence. It has never convinced a solid minority within the population. Individuals still manage to believe either that they constitute what might be called The Miraculous Exception whose body and brain act like no other body and brain in the face of incoming alcohol, or that — as shockingly articulated by a public representative not so long ago — a drink or two calms their nerves and makes them better at driving than if they were nervously sober.

But you don’t have to be an advocate of driving with a few units of alcohol in you, and you don’t have to be a holiday-maker sitting on a beach as Hurricane Irene heads towards you, to be unable to gauge risk.

Take the Nurofen controversy. Scotland Yard is currently examining every stage of the Nurofen production line as part of its investigation into how anti-psychotic medication found its way into Nurofen packets.

The Irish Medicines Board has recalled boxes of the drugs from wholesalers in the Republic of Ireland and pharmacists are being asked to check every packet on shop shelves.

Nurofen is now a front-page risk. It will be taken seriously. It should be taken seriously. If you take the medicine and have the smallest worry, take your package to a pharmacist to have it checked or replaced.

GETTING a sense of the level of risk posed might also be helpful. First of all, this contamination doesn’t compare with the definitive episode in the mid-80s, when someone who has never been convicted of the crime inserted cyanide into Tylenol capsules, causing several agonising deaths.

It does not compare, first of all, because the killing power of cyanide and the danger posed by anti-psychotic medication are on different scales of seriousness. It does not compare because — since the Tylenol episode, dealt with in exemplary fashion at the time by the manufacturer — over-the-counter caplets, capsules and tablets, in common with their prescription brethren, are shaped, coloured and brand-marked so as to minimise the possibility of mistakes on the part of the consumer. In addition, because this particular kind of Nurofen contains codeine, pharmacists ask questions when it is requested of them.

Unless you don’t read newspapers, watch TV, listen to radio or follow new media, it would be difficult not to be informed of the problem since it was outed. The bottom line is that the risk is immeasurably smaller than, say, ordering pills on the internet (which thousands of Irish people regularly do) or mixing drugs and alcohol.

Ruairi Quinn is Minister for Education at a point in human history where information — virtually all information — is available to everybody at a keystroke. Memorising data was the priority in other times. Now the thrust of education must be to inculcate the capacity to deal with available data. Part of that must be to develop a much more acute understanding of risk in all of us.