Afghanistan has once again become the leading producer of opium. The resurgance of the drug trade is playing into the hands of war lords and is contributing to the ongoing destabilization and lack of safety in the country.

US-Iraq
This ABC article is pretty ambiguous and I haven’t seen it picked up by other media. It’s a bit like locking the barn door after the horse is gone. Given the US government spin prior to the invasion of Iraq, I don’t see any big surprises here. I am curious to see where it will go.

SARS
Three babies delivered by caesarean section to SARS infected mothers in Hong Kong are being closely watched. Two of the mothers have died. Delivered prematurely because of the deterioration of the mothers health, doctors are monitoring them and testing for the virus, even though tests are not yet accurate, and it is not known if the newborns are exhibiting respiratory problems because they are premature.

A leading British infectious disease specialist who has been studying Hong Kong will be releasing his data next week.

The research by Professor Roy Anderson, due to be published in a medical journal next week, is expected to say the virus could kill between 8% and 15% - or one in seven - of those infected.

That is the headline about SARS today. However, the mortality rate isn’t the main problem and hasn’t been to date.

But Prof Anderson told the BBC that media speculation about Sars had exaggerated the problem facing the world.

He said the higher mortality rate was not the most important issue as so many other health factors could influence a patients’ death.

Prof Anderson said: “If this was a highly transmissible agent that was spreading like wildfire then of course there would be huge cause for concern, but it is not.

“It appears to be contained, certainly in developed countries, by very good containment and monitoring practices.

“The concerns lie in the large populous regions of the world: China, India, Indonesia, where the disease reporting systems are limited and it is much less clear to work out what is going on there.

Risk Management
A Toronto risk specialist Henry I. Miller, who is a physician and molecular biologist, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is not impressed with the government and media handling of SARS.

Media coverage does not exist in a vacuum. It merely amplifies the “emotional dimension” of peoples’ worries about various public health and environmental risks, and those “feelings” then affect individuals’ perceptions of risks. These emotional factors include, for example, whether the illness, activity or product is more, or less, voluntary, familiar, controllable, self-initiated, dreaded, immediate, detectable and “natural.”

Another important aspect of the public perception of risks from various activities, products, technologies and natural events is that in order to further their self-interest, a large coterie of activists and government regulators, abetted by a handful of scientists outside the scientific mainstream, relentlessly manipulate and terrify the public over hypothetical or minimal risks. It is important to understand the techniques they use to exploit the public’s emotions.

1. Information overload
2. Split into camps - us/them
3. An instinctual yearning to return to innocence as opposed to making informed choices
4. Manipulation of our concerns by those with other agendas

Distortion of risk perception increasingly causes us to lose the ability to discriminate between plausibility and provability, between plausibility and reality. The answer? We need to learn more about what we don’t understand, and to seek out the advice of genuine experts for guidance. And, oh, yes, to take with a large grain of salt the pronouncements of TV’s talking heads.