Synogenes.com

You can hardly watch the TV news without some story about something increasing the risk of heart attack or some other serious illness. Often it's associated with the mundane, eating something or other can double the risk of some illness or other.

It makes for good headlines using a combination of ignorance and scare tactics. More often than not there's no way of judging the actual risk being talked about but that's the really important bit.

Suppose the risk of getting illness A is 1 in 100, or 1%. If we now discover that eating too much salt increases that risk, we can truthfully use a headline like "Eating salt increases risk of A". Notice that we don't say in the headline what the level of risk is, nor what the increase is. It might, for example have increased the risk to 1.001%, that is increased the risk by an absolutely tiny amount so that one more person in 100,000 may get the illness. Or it might have quadrupled the risk so that instead of 1 in 100, it's now 4 in a hundred who might get it. The cases are very different, but the headline is the same. And that's the problem with a lot of medical reporting.

Most of the medical trials are reported in journals such as the Lancet or the British Medical Journal, generally reputable journals that don't sensationalise. The papers come with an abstract at the beginning giving the general summary of what the article reports. In almost all cases, the scientific reporting is cautious, making only evidenced claims, pointing to the need for further research, putting the comments in context and so on.

But by the time these are reported in the headlines, all that boring, but crucial context gets lost. So instead of saying "marginal increase in risk", it becomes "increased risk". And as we're all paranoid about chronic and debilitating illnesses, we sit up and take notice of medical statistics - except we're not given them to evaluate. We're given untestable general statements.

Tonight on the BBC News, there was a report that obesity increases the likelihood of death in childbirth and for five minutes, that was the focus of the message. Right at the end, they managed to talk to a doctor who indicated that death in childbirth in the UK is very rare. In fact, though they didn't say so, it's around 1 in 5800. On the news item, despite having a fat pregnant woman saying she was scared by the danger of being overweight, there was no evidence presented.

No doubt, being overweight increases the risk of complications during pregnancy but what we had tonight was propaganda not information. It serves only to undermine rational discussion of risk because it doesn't provide any indication of scale, or the relative risks - that would have reduced the story to something quite mundane.

To evaluate risk, you need to know the actual incidence rate and then compare it with other risks. Then you need to think about how you mitigate those risks on a day to day basis. Some risks, you choose to take, others you don't. Some can easily be avoided altogether like the risk of cancer from smoking, whereas others such as traffic accidents are not quite as under your own control.

Being careful is all about getting an understanding of the absolute and relative risks, and poor journalism that obscures these for the headline just makes it difficult for people to judge seriousness. When people lose the ability to distinguish levels of risk, all sorts of silly fads are encouraged, and more significantly, people make dangerous choices about their health. That can range from whacky diets avoiding salt, to depending on shaman-like magic from homeopaths, through to swinging from one risk-avoidance strategy to another.

Whenever we see some headline talking about increased risks, we need to know what the risk was, and what it becomes. Without that we don't have a news story, we have a scare story.

There's a debate going on at the moment about primary schools that have decided not to have a traditional christian nativity play this year. Typically, UK primary schools enact the christian myth using a cast drawn from keen and excited children in their care and on one level it is just a drama event for the kids to get involved in.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4102277.stm

Listening to those who are arguing that it should be kept in schools as a traditional christian event, the purpose is far more than simply giving the kids a play to take part in. It's a positive indoctrination into christian beliefs. Five-year-old children don't have very much in the way of critical faculties and if they're told Jesus was holy and was supposed to be worshipped, that's not simply the plot of a story for a play, that's something they will be disposed to believe. And that's the whole idea.

Many schools have multicultural cachment areas and it has become inappropriate to insist for example that muslim children should be either encouraged to take part, or be excluded. So for purely pragmatic reasons, schools have had to find a more sensible approach and many are opting for some other moral play of a non-religious nature, something that all the kids can get involved in. That sounds like an inclusive, progressive thing to do, illustrating that ethical values and morality do not have any necessary connection to religion.

The church is understandably somewhat taken aback by this practical demonstration of secular ethical teaching - after all, the christian church campaigned against literacy in England to ensure that only the priesthood would be able to interpret the Bible, as only the religiously trained were thought capable of understanding morality and ethics. How wrong they were!

There is a curious multicultural twist to all this though. Divali and Eid are celebrated in many schools and there are arguments from parents saying they want the christmas nativity to be more explicitly religious. Because the muslim festivals are by definition strictly religious, they want some too.

It seems we have to have religious festivals because the politically correct folks don't want to prevent a community celebrating its religion, but on the other hand, they don't want an explicitly religious nativity. Sooner or later someone will have to stand up and argue for religion to be out of schools altogether. Keep the drama, the parties, the cross-cultural cooperation and fun,just ditch the religion - better all round.

And for those who insist that children should learn the truth of the nativity as some theist put it on the radio, I think that would be an excellent idea. Tell them it's a good story, a myth, just like lots of others. Tell them about Aesop's Fables, about the Rig Veda, about the stories in the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita. Better still, let them make up their own morality tales - now that would have something to do with education.