Philip Alcabes discusses myths of health, disease and risk.

Iconography of Risk

For some time now, watching a ballgame on TV has meant sitting through sappy commercials that advertise remedies for what we’re supposed to call “erectile dysfunction.”  This season, at least in New York, the baseball viewer who isn’t quick with the remote will be treated to gruesome negative advertising about smoking.  If you’re squeamish, you have to move fast to avoid staring at the inside of arteries, hands with amputated fingers, or throats with holes in them.

This week, the city’s health department announces that it wants to require thousands of retailers who sell tobacco products to put up posters with the same disgust-inducing images – as Jennifer 8. Lee noted at the Times‘s City Room blog on Wednesday and an AP story (picked up by Newsday) explained on Thursday.

And it won’t be little stickers the stores are required to put up:  these posters would have to be at least a foot-and-a-half square.

It looks like the city’s health agency is going to continue its program of treating New Yorkers like we’re stupid and reckless, despite the departure of the bluenose Dr. Thomas Frieden (who left NYC to become CDC Director this month).  The prevailing view at the health department seems to be that officials have to keep sermonizing or we dumb slobs will slide back into bad habits.

As Jan Barrett noted Thursday, people who smoke nowadays know quite well what they’re doing, and why.

Barrett, an ex-smoker, notes that “every time I lit up a cigarette I was fully aware of what it was doing to my body. I mean how can any smoker not know these days what smoking can do to them? There are warning signs everywhere. I don’t care how many warning signs I saw or heard about I still lit that cigarette every morning.”

The health department claims that negative advertising will help convince smokers they should quit. But smokers don’t need to be convinced — about 70% of smokers have tried to quit, and (as the above comment exemplifies) some of those who don’t quit are aware of the dangers but smoke anyway.

The department also claims the gruesome-ad campaign will dissuade teens from taking up smoking to begin with.  But retail stores wouldn’t be the place to post the ads, then – since the shops aren’t permitted to sell to minors in any case (nor would TV: if it were teenagers who were watching baseball games, there wouldn’t be so many Viagra ads).

We might think that resorting to a signage campaign like this is a cover-up for inactivity, but it isn’t:  the health department already runs a vigorous program of smoking-cessation activities , which can include nicotine-replacement therapies.

No, the new gruesome-poster initiative isn’t about health; it’s closer to religion.  The images of smoking-induced damage are iconography.

Frank Furedi calls this sort of thing secular moral entrepreneurship.

The iconography of the religion of risk avoidance is meant to remind sinners – people who eat the wrong foods, don’t exercise enough, have sex without condoms, fail to take medication for our depression, or smoke cigarettes — that it might be rigorous to follow the True Faith of Health, but it’s worth it.  “Look at how others have suffered in order to learn what you now know,” they say.  “How can you go on with your nasty ways when you’ve got a chance to save yourself?”

The city’s new health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, is apparently as ardent as Frieden about browbeating and hectoring people who fail to comply with health guidelines.  The television advertising and the signage isn’t meant to make the population healthier – its job is to remind us how to behave, and the consequences of impropriety.

By Philip Alcabes | June 27th, 2009 | Categories: Behavior, Disease, Health Professions, News, Risk, public health | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off

Cookie Crisis: Toxic Food Environment or World Food Shortage

One by one, the foods that seem most American are turning out to cause illness.  Last year, people got sick from Salmonella St. Paul in fast-food tacos (the jalapeño peppers were contaminated) and then others from Salmonella typhimurium in peanut butter (back in 2006-7 there had also been an outbreak of salmonellosis associated with eating peanut butter).

And now it’s Toll House chocolate chip cookies.  The dough has been recalled by Nestlé because some batches contain E. coli O157:H7, a potentially dangerous strain, with at least 66 cases in 28 states.  There have been 7 severe cases of hemolytic-uremic syndrome, although no deaths.

At the Center for Science in the Public Interest, food safety lawyer Sarah Klein says “If there was anyone left in America who didn’t realize we need to reform the food safety functions at the Food and Drug Administration, this latest recall of Nestle Toll House Cookie Dough provides a sobering wakeup call,” telling the NY Times that “If there was ever any doubt that we’ve reached a crisis, this should provide the proof.”

But crisis of what?  The FDA itself isn’t sure how the bacteria got into the dough, and CDC is still investigating. What are we supposed to wake up to?  Is it toxicity?

According to research recently reported in the Milbank Quarterly, the metaphor that Americans most commonly hold responsible for obesity is a toxic food environment. — over 75 percent of respondents subscribed to this view of the obesity epidemic.

With foodborne disease, it isn’t obesity that’s at stake, but it seems that the same view of American eating shapes responses.  That the foods recently associated with bacterial outbreaks are so quintessentially American helps.  So does awareness of the tortuous journey that many foods take to market now, which is what makes it hard to know exactly how, where, and when contamination might occur.

But surely the U.S. doesn’t face a food crisis of the sort that the impoverished countries of the world do — a crisis of environmental change, political struggles over land use, access to clean water, and food shortage for a billion people worldwide.

Americans generally manage not to talk about the lives of people for whom food crisis means dirty water and the questionable availability of cassava flour or cornmeal mush, but are pleased that our own food crisis does not involve such deprivation.

At the same time, a lot of people here feel suspicious of the technical apparatus that has afforded us our cornucopia.  They are suspicious of the ways Americans (or most Americans) have access to the modern groaning board without our having to hunt, scrape the soil, haul water, or collect firewood – just park the car, enter the store, and take out cash or a debit card.  It seems too easy.  It isn’t traditional, natural, organic.

The occasional news story on food contamination validates those concerns, tells anxious people that they were right to be suspicious – that American food producers are poisoning us all.

To say that an event (cookie-related or other) is a wake-up call is to demand surveillance and control.  It says that someone has done something wrong (CSPI doesn’t need to tell us who that is – they mean the usual suspect:  big business, aided by lax government).

If someone has done something wrong, then surveillance – better food-plant inspection, for instance – and control will fix the problem.  But the wake-up call doesn’t really wake anyone up to the larger problem, or its nuances.

We’d like everyone worldwide to have enough to eat.  And not just enough rice or roots – we’d like everyone to be able to eat a diverse and nutritious diet.  We’d also like to be able to have chocolate chip cookies and other tasty processed food, at least from time to time.  We’d like all that to happen with a minimum of suffering caused by the food itself.  It’s unreasonable to think that nobody will ever get sick from contaminated food — but we’d like foodborne disease to be limited.

The technology and the transportation know-how exist to make that future possible.  But people concerned about food content, food safety, and food plenty have barely started the sort of conversation that would allow all the many pieces to be fit together globally.  The way to make such a vision of food adequacy and diversity possible still isn’t clear.  To argue for better surveillance and oversight of American food production is fine – but it doesn’t move us far along the road to solving the larger food crisis.  It’s going to take more than FDA inspection to get us there.

By Philip Alcabes | June 20th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, News, Outbreaks, epidemics, public health | Tags: , , , | Comments Off

The Agony of the A.M.A.

Sam Stein at Huffington Post comments on the American Medical Association’s latest attempt to (as he puts it) torpedo health care reform by opposing any government-sponsored insurance plan.  The AMA’s announcement was reported Wednesday night in the NY Times.

At DailyKos, doctoraaron explains why he is resigning from the AMA, and is participating in Physicians for a National Health Program.  And DemFromCT notes the high public support for reform, provided it’s affordable.

The AMA is already catching flak for sounding like, well, a bunch of doctors interested only in preserving physicians’ privilege.  Of course, that’s what the AMA is – it’s a trade guild, and (it thinks) it’s doing its job.  The only surprise – especially given how many physicians are firmly behind reform of health care financing — is that the organization is so willing to be so open about being so neanderthal.

The AMA’s statement sounds to us like the organization’s dying gasp.  It’s standing up for a vanishing version of what it means to be a doctor.

In fact, the history of the AMA’s own stance toward social insurance is revealing.  In The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr explains that until the 1930s the AMA didn’t like the idea of any medical insurance at all — it was fearful that physicians would fall under the sway of the public health establishment if social insurance were instituted and under the control of insurance companies in the case of private insurance. The AMA has always been more worried about doctors losing control over their own practice than about financing.  Patient care isn’t the AMA’s job, and never has been.

Why social health insurance failed in the U.S. is a complicated story.  It involves ideology, of course, but it’s inflected with plenty of nuance:  the troubled relation of labor unions to American industry, the not-so-troubled relation of industrial corporations to the American political establishment, political favor currying, the rise of scientific medicine, the entire question of whether there should be insurance for medical care.  Through it all runs the AMA’s devotion to the image of the physician as independent decision maker.

The reason for the AMA’s death agony today is that it’s defending a dying species.  Physicians don’t get to make independent decisions much.  And the backward-looking AMA isn’t showing any interest in forward thinking about the positive roles that doctors could play in a really care-centered set-up.

The business of doctoring, which was once a trade that pitted physicians against herbalists, apothecaries, surgeons, patent-medicine hawkers, faith healers, etc., competing for access to Americans’ bodies, has become just a trade, once again. Only now, it’s not that physicians are competing with snake-oil salesmen — it’s that the business of caring for Americans’ health is no longer managed by a medical professional working one-on-one with a patient.

That individual suffering isn’t the main focus of the big, costly healthcare system is well known to anyone who has sought diagnosis of a troubling condition or relief from chronic problems.  That physicians are themselves just cogs in the system isn’t so obvious — until you listen to them talk about their own frustrations.  They wish their practice could be driven by patients’ needs or, at least, by evidence on what treatments work best.  But often the control is exerted by the institution, and by insurance companies’ policies on pricing and payout.

The AMA is still fighting for the vanishing breed, though.  Someday soon, the AMA will have to disband because its constituency, the exalted independent physician, will have become extinct and the organization will have failed to recognize just what the rest of America — including most physicians — wants.  Meanwhile, don’t be surprised to hear its dying gasps.

ADDENDUM:

Just saw Abraham Verghese’s “To the AMA:  It’s Not About You” post at Atlantic magazine today.   He urges the organization, “please don’t tell the American public (a public already disenchanted with physicians and health care) that you are doing this for their benefit because of your great concern for the patient. The public does not believe you. They aren’t that naive.”

By Philip Alcabes | June 12th, 2009 | Categories: Health Professions, News, Physicians, public health | Tags: , , , , | 1 comment

Pandemics, politics, poverty

At Junkfood Science yesterday, Sandy Szwarc exploded some of the myths about the swine flu outbreak.  Although much is made of the fact that the hospitalizations and deaths associated with H1N1 flu infection have predominantly been among children and young adults, Junkfood notes that those numbers are no higher than in past flu seasons.  Her post quotes Dr. Anne Schuchat of CDC, who reminded the media at a May 28th briefing that seasonal flu generally comprises a mixture of H1N1, H3N2, and B influenza strains – and that H1N1 strains tend to cause relatively more illness among the young.

“Declaring a pandemic has more to do with politics than with medicine or helping you to stay safer. In fact, responses to fears about a pandemic are far more frightening and dangerous than the flu itself,” Junkfood Science points out.

At Effect Measure, a post by revere on 6 June voices skepticism over the utility of the W.H.O.’s pandemic threat alert system.  revere writes, “The WHO pandemic alert system, which was instituted in 2003 and had never been seriously tested until this outbreak, immediately met a pandemic it couldn’t handle, not because it was so severe but because it wasn’t severe enough. “  revere finds the threat alert system to be “more of a problem than a help.”

A report out this month on “Pandemic Flu” from the Trust for America’s Health, asserts that “Investments in pandemic planning and stockpiling antiviral medications paid off,” but “even with a mild outbreak, the health care delivery system was overwhelmed.”  Still, this report noted that the “WHO pandemic alert phases caused confusion.”  This is reassuringly un-martial talk for a group whose report is subtitled “Lessons from the Frontlines” and which is partially funded by the Center for Biosecurity.

We agree that the pandemic alert causes confusion – and, we’ll add, consternation – and concur with Junkfood that the alert is about politics.  But W.H.O. gets an overly bum rap.  The agency has been trying to leverage its clunky threat-alert barometer to help health officials in poor countries to plead their case for more funding or better programs, and to get us in the rich countries to notice that it’s the poor who suffer when a disease spreads globally.

The pandemic barometer as constructed is too crude an instrument for that.  As revere points out at Effect Measure, the system could be “scrap[ped]… in favor of an up-to-date information system.”

But the important point will be to shift the focus.  The medical and public health industries have to stop thinking about flu (and other contagions of world importance) as a problem only when Americans’ health is threatened.  The health sector has to start paying much more attention to the conditions under which viruses become epidemic (i.e., human disease) problems:  the many ways that humans and animals interact, especially through markets for wild-animal meat, and the interactions of wild with domesticated animals; economic conditions in poor countries that make it impossible for people to stay out of the way of virus traffic; and the poverty, crowding, and compromised health that make it easy for some viruses to spread once they start adapting to humans.

Instead of worrying about airplane passengers landing at U.S. airports, the focus should be on the real conditions that most of the world – and its viruses – lives in.

By Philip Alcabes | June 7th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, Health Professions, epidemics, public health | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 comments