People seem awfully scared these days. And who can blame them? When you turn on the TV, read a newspaper, or surf the internet, it’s hard to avoid all the sinister warnings of impending doom that awaits you and your family from the second you wake up in the morning. Judging from all the talk, it’s a wonder we’re still alive as a species! If it’s not viruses and bacteria that are going to kill you, it’s poisonous paint on toys, tainted spinach, mad cow disease, the bird flu, tuberculosis, you name it. And that’s just the microbial threats. There are also the violent nannies, the neighborhood molester, the high-school shooter, the religious fanatic, the list goes on and on. We live in a perilous world. Or at least that’s what the news wants us to think.

My parents always taught me to take a step back and try to look at things objectively. It’s far from easy. Your brain wants to react a certain way and it’s difficult to apply cold hard logic to something that seems to be a threat to your own life, or that of your family and friends. But when you do, it’s surprising how different the world looks.

Here’s one example. A couple of years ago there was a huge controversy over young girls using birth control pills. A 16-year-old girl died of a blood clot after taking the pills and the mother sued both the doctor that prescribed them and the drug manufacturer. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she told news cameras how her daughter had insisted on taking the pills even though she was young and overweight and she couldn’t stop her. A reporter took the doctors and pharmaceutical companies to task, asking them if it wasn’t questionable prescribing birth control pills to teenagers when they were “known to kill people.” I had a chat with my doctor while all of this was going on and asked him what he thought. He shook his head and said: “You know, more people die from using cold medication than birth control pills, yet no one ever tries to take those medicines off the shelves. And it is far more dangerous for a 16-year-old to get pregnant than it is to take the pill anyway.”

And how about the SARS scare in 2003. Remember when large portions of the Asian population in the Lower Mainland all of a sudden started wearing face masks for fear of contracting SARS? Yet there was only one outbreak in Canada that claimed a total of 13 lives. More people die of the common cold every year.

It seems we are all a little too eager to be afraid. It’s as if we need to have dangers around us. I don’t know why this is but I do know why it’s getting worse. Just turn on the TV. In any given commercial break, you are likely to see an ad for disinfectant wipes or anti-bacterial soap. My favourite is the one where a mother uses a breast of raw chicken to clean the surfaces of her kitchen. The claim is that unless you disinfect your house constantly, you are exposing yourself and your family to viruses, bacteria and mortal danger. As a result, I’ve noticed more and more people carrying disinfectant products like Purel and use them constantly. Yet in reality it is the lack of exposure to these viruses and bacteria that is dangerous. If we are not exposed to such minor hazards in our everyday lives, our immune systems grow weak and become unable to fight off a truly dangerous infection. So by disinfecting our houses, we are actually creating more problems than we are solving.

At the video store, there is a DVD that’s always out. It’s called “Bird Flu” and the cover features a bio-hazard symbol, some birds and a man and a woman running. I always found the term bird flu kind of amusing because almost all flus (or influenzas as they are properly named) come from birds. There really is no such thing as the bird flu. They are all bird flus. And most of them are harmless. The fear of the big plague-like bird flu stems from the fact that there has been no pandemic flue outbreak since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 that is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people. But the world today is vastly different from that of post World War I Europe where that flu broke out. And in spite of all the dire predictions, chances are we won’t actually see a pandemic of that magnitude brought on by a flu any time soon. Yet people fear it like the plague (no pun intended).

In the late 90s, there was an outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain. Millions of cattle were slaughtered and burned and the agricultural community suffered for years as a consequence. I travelled through London during the worst of it and one image has stuck with me ’till this day: Outside a Burger King restaurant, the management had put up a crude poster that read “1 in 35,000,000 get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Only 34,999,952 to go!” By 2007, a total of 165 Britons had died from eating beef infected by BSE. That’s out of a total population of 58.7 million people. I’m not trying to make light of the suffering of the victims or their families; I’m just pointing out that the fear of infection from mad cows was quite exaggerated. There is no widespread danger here, yet people act as if they are just inches away from death at all times.

Maybe the most extreme example I’ve seen of this kind of mass paranoia is the North American fear of Halloween candy. Every Halloween, you hear the same stories of poisoned candy and parents going through their kid’s pumpkin pales with a fine-toothed comb to see if there is anything suspicious. I never believed these stories myself. I figured if they were true, the news would make reference to specific events and some research has proven my skepticism to be well placed: There are no documented cases of random poisonings using Halloween candy or any candy for that matter. There are a couple of cases where family members have poisoned each other with candy but that’s it. The Urban Legend busting web site Snopes.com has a complete breakdown of this myth, both where it came from and how it has spread. It’s sobering reading for parents who have deprived their children of their hard-earned candy for years.

True, there are very real dangers in our everyday lives. Most of them involve either our own homes or the vehicles we drive. But in spite of the fact that you are far more likely to be killed in an accident at home or in your car than you are flying a plane, we tend to ignore the obvious dangers and focus on those we have no control over, even if they turn out to be nothing but hot air. So next time you go to the store to buy cleaner, just get the regular kind. Anti-bacterial disinfectant won’t do you any good unless you are cleaning a hospital. And stop hovering over public toilet seats. You are more likely to catch something nasty from the escalator handrail. Your kids are far more likely to get sick from undercooked meat than mad cows and the only worrying thing about Halloween candy is the dental bill it generates.

The world is only a scary place if you want it to be.