Philip Alcabes discusses myths of health, disease and risk.

New Year’s Wishes for Public Health

May 2010 be the year when health officials return to the business of alleviating suffering and stop promoting panic. (Don’t miss Nathalie Rothschild’s “Ten Years of Fear” in Spiked!’s Farewell to the Noughties, recounting the hyped-up panics of the ’00s — from the Y2K bug to swine flu.)

May CDC become a force for real public health, not an advocate for the risk-avoidance canard.  May the new director, Dr. Frieden, stop favoring pharmaceutical companies’ profit making through expansion of immunization.  And may he direct the agency to begin to address legitimate public needs, like sound answers about vaccines and autism, and clear communication about what is — and isn’t — dangerous about obesity.

May WHO officials stop playing with the pandemic threat barometer.  May WHO begin demanding that the world’s wealthy countries devote at least the same resources to stopping diarrheal diseases, malaria, and TB as they do to dealing with high-news-value problems like new strains of flu.   Diarrheal illness kills as many children in Africa and Asia in any given week as the 2009 swine flu killed Americans in eight months.  So does malaria.   Direct policy, and money, toward sanitation, pure water free of parasites, adequate treatment of TB, mosquito control, and prevention of other causes of heavy mortality in the developing world — not just flu strains that threaten North America, Europe, and Japan.

May public health professionals lose their obsessions with bad habits. May the public health profession return to the problem of ensuring basic rights — access to sufficient food, clean water, decent housing, good education, a livable wage, and adequate child care — and ease up on its moralistic obsessions with nicotine and overeating (for recent examples of the preoccupation with tobacco, see this article or this one (abstracts here; subscription needed for full articles) in recent issues of the American Journal of Public Health).

May science be what Joanne Manaster does at her incomparable website: looking at the world with wonder, asking without dogmatic preconceptions how it works, and accepting that its irrepressible quirkiness makes it impossible to know the world perfectly.  May science not be the crystal-ball-gazing thing whose so-called “scientific” forecasts are really doomsday scenes worthy of the medieval Church — predictions of liquefied icecaps and rising seas,  hundreds of millions of deaths in a flu pandemic, or catastrophic plagues sparked by people with engineered smallpox virus.  There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about both the environment and disease outbreaks based on sound here-and-now observations; leave the forecasts of Apocalypse to the clergy, who know how to handle dread.

A new year’s wish (from the valedictory exhortation in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America):  “More life!”

By Philip Alcabes | January 4th, 2010 | Categories: Behavior, Disease, epidemics, Health Professions, Myths, News, obesity, Outbreaks, public health, Risk | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 comment

Revolving door? Official agencies and the private sector

In late December, Effect Measure reacted to former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding’s hiring as President of Merck Vaccines. With customary cogency and insight, Revere addresses the problem of the so-called Revolving Door.

At The Great Beyond, Daniel Cressey notes that Dr. Gerberding, while at CDC, was accused of promoting the Bush Administration’s agendas at the cost of scientific accuracy.  Naturally, now that she is heading for Merck, many are concerned about what looks like a cozy relationship between official agencies and pharmaceutical companies.

Merck says that its vaccine arm is worth $5 billion.  It “markets vaccines for 12 of the 17 diseases for which the U.S. Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices currently recommends vaccines,” according to the company’s press release.

Dr. Gerberding was close to the vaccine world as head of CDC. In fact, during her tenure there CDC’s   Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) called for the implementation of immunization against human papillomavirus and varicella zoster (chicken pox) virus and the agency pushed for expanded immunization against seasonal flu; within 10 months of her (January ’09) departure from CDC, the ACIP had issued recommendations for the use of anthrax vaccine and Cervarix and Gardasil vaccines against HPV.  Gardasil  is a Merck product.

But the problem is more than the “revolving door” metaphor implies.  To have a door there must be a wall — a clear demarcation between inside and out.   As if corporations (pharmaceutical companies among them) were outside of the official system, eager to get the ear of those inside.

Whereas it seems that there isn’t really much of a wall between official health agencies and big business at all.  To be an official today means taking a veritable oath of loyalty to corporate solutions.  The official has to deal in risk.  She has to be ready to sell risk as a kind of debt:  people should want to avoid risk, just as they avoid debt; but if their behaviors put them “at risk,” they can relieve it through “lifestyle” correction.  You can refinance if you know how.

The correction that allegedly relieves risk usually involves the use of better products. Cut out trans fats,  lower your cholesterol, elevate your mood, hop on a treadmill, lose weight, drink responsibly, get seasonal flu vaccine, get swine flu vaccine, wait patiently while the full-body scanners are used at the airport, eat more vegetables, wear sunblock, use hand sanitizer.  Health officials’ job is to get the means for personal risk reduction to the sorry at-risk population.  Have hand-sanitizer dispensers installed in public buildings.  Distribute condoms.  Publish recipes for healthy meals.

Notably, health officials are not supposed to argue for any of the things that would actually make a difference to the public’s overall health:  redress wealth disparities, provide excellent primary care for everyone (including immigrants), or build more decent and affordable housing.  When was the last time you heard a health official call for a campaign against poverty?

The official has to pitch personal risk reduction, in other words.  She has to be ready to support high-cost, individualized approaches to improving the public’s health — or well-being, which, Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick astutely notes at Spiked!, has replaced health as the main objective of modern Good Works .

Health officials keep faith with the dogma of risk avoidance.  Corporations preach risk reduction and peddle the wares by which people can restructure their lives — and avoid risk.  The wall separating government policy makers from corporate solutions gets more and more flimsy.

By Philip Alcabes | January 1st, 2010 | Categories: Ethics, Health Professions, public health, Risk | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 comments

Medicine and Magic

In his post at The Atlantic yesterday, Abraham Verghese made the case that magical thinking is a powerful driver of debates over health and health care.

“We all want to believe that a pill or potion that comes from sea coral or from the Amazon jungle will cure that pain for which little else has worked,” Verghese writes.  The “flip side,” he says, “is that we are extraordinarily sensitive to any suggestion that someone is taking away something we think is good for our health.”

And magical thinking’s influence isn’t limited to cruising the natural supplements aisle or reading the ads in a health magazine.  Sometimes it’s part of expert opinion — and so it becomes part of widespread belief.

Consider how the flu experts talk about the possibility of swine flu’s return this fall. In Monday’s Washington Post, the experts’ words wax electric.  Dr. William Schaffner, chair of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt U.’s medical school, asserts that “The virus is still around and ready to explode…. We’re potentially looking at a very big mess.” And Dr. Arnold Monto, a physician epidemiologist at U. Michigan’s School of Public Health, worries “about our ability to handle a surge of severe cases.”

So, even as H5N1 reports that an article in The Independent finds scientists skeptical as to whether there will be a so-called second wave of serious flu outbreaks in the northern hemisphere this fall, we’ve got American scientists suggesting — in high-voltage terms — that something awful is going to happen.

They’re not wrong: something bad might happen.  That’s always true.

But language matters.  And language coming from so-called experts matters a lot.  It has magic.

Vigorous metaphors promote popular fears.  The last time swine flu came around, in early 1976, respected virologist Edwin Kilbourne published an influential op-ed piece in the NY Times (13 Feb 1976), called “Flu to the Starboard! Man the Harpoons! Fill with Vaccine! Get the Captain! Hurry!” Kilbourne urged officials to prepare for an “imminent natural disaster.” Fair enough:  a serious H1N1 flu might have happened in ’76 (it didn’t) — but his whaling metaphor appealed to more than just preparation.  It was about power and authority (“get the captain!”).  Presumably, the authority of science, industry, and government.

And so with other metaphors that are meant to be calls to arms.  There were the warfare metaphors about the alleged threat of bioterrorism, and the plague metaphors about AIDS.  Now, there are explosive metaphors about obesity.

Last year, acting U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Steven Galson called childhood obesity a “national catastrophe,” for instance.  And Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, warned of obesity’s “corrosive” effects, which, she asserted, imperil a generation of America’s youth.  According to Dr. Matthew Gillman of Harvard “You build [obesity] up over generations” — like an electrical charge in a capacitor, like explosive potential, the reader has to presume.

Talking about childhood obesity, Dr. Eric Hoffman of Stanford told the Washington Post that “we have taught our children how to kill themselves.”

Invoking metaphors to create magical thinking isn’t just an American habit.  Childhood obesity is a “time bomb,” according to physician Howard Stoate, chair of Britain’s All-Parliamentary Group on Primary Care and Public Health.

Verghese’s right.  People can be afraid to let go of what they believe they need for their health — however magically.  And magical thinking is inside the way our experts talk to us about health.  That sort of magic can run deep.

By Philip Alcabes | August 13th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, Health Professions, Myths, Narratives, obesity, Physicians, public health, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Medicine and Magic

Fear and Flu

Kudos to Revere, for two enlightening posts on flu — which bear on an important issue in the health realm today.

Last Tuesday, a post by Revere at Effect Measure highlighted the effect that cultural anxieties have on the production of scientific knowledge — specifically with regard to modes of contagion.   In the 1920s, a time of worry about immigrants and socialists, public health “concentrate[d] on society’s most marginal people, in keeping with the Zeitgeist.”  Thus Typhoid Mary, and other concerns about germ carriers.  By contrast, when the environment is of most concern, people worry about transmission via objects — fomites in our odd epidemiology jargon (from Latin fomes:  touchwood or tinder).  There are reminders to wash hands after touching the subway handholds, not to handle other kids’ toys, to think about doorknobs.

On Thursday, “Swine flu this fall:  turbulence ahead” took the time to work through the results of mathematical modeling — a highly readable post which explains why some modeling results suggest a rationale for the belief that swine flu might spread intensely in the northern hemisphere this fall.  Revere does the favor of reminding the reader that models are not always good predictors of what will happen.

History shows that the metaphors that guide scientists’ focus in tracking contagion aren’t always perfectly either/or.   They don’t alternate neatly between people-directed or environment-directed, that is — more typically, many myths and metaphors compete for attention, with certain ones winning out at any given moment.  Now, the alleged toxicity of the environment seems very compelling to some people, and there are also contagion concepts based on fears of foreigners, suspicions of supposedy nefarious corporations, worries about open borders, anxieties about public education, concerns that governments keep secrets, and so forth.

The guiding metaphors for contagion breathe life into moral, political, or profit-making campaigns.  The magic-bullet concept remains compelling, for instance, and perhaps accounts for some of the interest not only in Tamiflu but in whether or not flu strains are resistant to it, and whether or not it will be made available,  to whom, and at what cost.  There’s a post at H5N1 on this today.

But there’s an overarching truth about swine flu:  our society can’t seem to leave it alone.  No matter how small the tally of confirmed H1N1 flu deaths (WHO counted 1154 as of the end of July, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control‘s report today puts the number of deaths at 1645 — but even the higher number yields an exceptionally low case-fatality ratio:  under 0.1%, roughly on the order of seasonal flu.  So this remains a far-reaching but so-far mild outbreak.

Yet the question of whether or not it will become more severe — more virulent, more deadly — remains front and center for public health people, and stays alive as a media story.

Okay, yes, it’s important to be prepared.  It would be shameful if there were deaths that would have been preventable with a little forethought and planning.

That accounts for the assiduous tracking by serious public-health people.  But what accounts for the prominence of this rather mild outbreak in the public consciousness?

This is an era of epidemics.  Which is to say, it is an era of fear.  There must be something wrong, it is so easy to think.  This is not just the work of media (although they help, and it doesn’t hurt that playing on fear sells).  It runs deeper than that.  Our modern civilization seems, sometimes, deeply uncomfortable with the world we’ve created.

Last Thursday, for instance, the  New York Times ran a story featuring a study that claimed TV viewing is linked to blood pressure increases in kids.  It’s a story of toxicity in the constructed environment — of the ways contemporary arrangements are inherently and latently harmful (yes, latently:  TV isn’t causing kids to shoot other kids, at least not in this story; it is allegedly causing them to develop a so-called risk factor for later harm).

How do we keep an eye on flu, or other outbreaks, and seek ways to protect everyone from harm as best we can, but avoid hysteria about contaminated toys, subway riding, TV viewing, processed foods, and so forth?  This is a challenge.  It means examining what makes us anxious, and it means understanding that life has risks that can’t be avoided.

By Philip Alcabes | August 9th, 2009 | Categories: Disease, epidemics, Health Professions, Myths, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fear and Flu

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, epidemics, Health Professions, public health | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 comments

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