Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310060119
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By HOWARD SCHNEIDER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
- from "Hidden Hazards," published by Consumer Federation of America
Here is the problem. Do I stay at my desk, and spend yet another hour breathing as the newsroom ceiling oozes lead dust? Or do I go to the cafeteria for a hamburger and ingest some cow's intestinal bacteria?
I could order a nice, chunky fruit salad, except that more than 1,000 people a year die from choking on food.
I could go for a walk instead. Except that around 800 people a year die from being hit by falling objects.
There is, it seems, an epidemic of death afoot. Accidents claim 45,000 lives a year and send hundreds of thousands more to the hospital, and it is utterly impossible to skirt calamity.
At least that's the feeling inspired by the Consumer Federation of America's recently released list of "Hidden Hazards," a collection of killers that, the group feels, needs more attention.
The list is selective - the federation chose items where it felt people could easily reduce their risk - but the sweep is so broad that no age or aspect of life is excluded, from infancy to senescence, from the barroom to the bedroom.
This is just what we need. It is not enough knowing we are born to die.
Into the gloom marches the federation, and countless other hazard-of-the-month societies, introducing more gloom.
Forget old age. Forget heart disease, cancer, car wrecks and other major social traumas like gunplay in the city. Death still lurks, though it is more like the Three Stooges run amok. God, it appears, loves good slapstick.
People get struck by lightning, knock the toaster in the bathtub or slip under the lawn mower. Stuff falls on them. They fall on stuff. Stuff gets left inside by doctors (four deaths in 1990).
AIDS (30,000 deaths a year) is an easy call by comparison. You know what to do. Or not do. But accidents: The only plausible message is just to stay in bed. (Though several hundred people a year die falling out of it.)
The federation's theory in promoting its list is that an educated consumer is a safer one. Toddlers drowning in buckets is a horrific thought, after all, and easily prevented; a helmet, likewise, is a small price to avoid the hundreds of deaths and thousands of head injuries that result from bicycle accidents each year.
"Many Americans do have that feeling that everything causes cancer, or that people die a lot of different ways and you cannot control your future," said Mary Ellen Fise, product-safety director for the federation. "The point we were trying to make is that there are some simple things you can do that don't mean drastic changes that can reduce your risk. . . . Maybe we could make some small incremental change in behavior. You save one life, you feel good."
One wonders whether a national time-out from hair-pulling might not be as beneficial to the collective soul as strapping on a crash helmet whenever you walk under a ladder.
The federation, it seems, only scratched the surface. For more on the story, consult the national bible of death: "Vital Statistics of the United States, Volume II: Mortality" published annually by the Centers for Disease Control.
Think the world is a safer place without nuclear power and communism?
Think again. Here are the numbers from 1990 - the latest available:
Electrocution in the home: 100.
Lightning: 89.
Venomous animals and plants: 55.
Fall from stairs or steps: 1,148.
Struck accidentally by objects or persons: 215.
Suffocation by plastic bag: 42.
So disconnect the power, and always ask for paper. Once the precautions are in place, we'll have a long life to tackle the next epidemic: death by inanition.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB