Monday, November 15, 2004, 5:31pm
Monday, November 15, 2004, 5:31pm
Group hysteria is not the fear of something unusual – it is a fear of something quite ordinary exaggerated beyond any reasonable proportion.
Along these lines I’ve been reading a Sept 15, 2004 article from the Herald Sun, a Down Under newspaper printed in Melbourne. To my ear the Aussies and Brits share a common sensitivity on the topics of risk and uncertainty, and this particular article demonstrates how it can be woven into their news copy. I won’t try to explain the cultural differences since I don’t have a clue about the origins of this writing style, but I thought it might be useful to toss this into the fire I’m building on the topic of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
The article is entitled Many still unaware of CJD Risk and apparently the main point of the article is to undo this premise.
Let’s start with the first line readers might have discovered while sipping their morning coffee…
DOZENS of Victorians may have been exposed to a deadly brain illness related to mad cow disease and still not know it.
I consider the possibility of a joke, but the notion fades as I continue…
Patients were told of the scare after an autopsy revealed a cancer patient who died in June, and who had surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in January and November last year, had CJD.
CJD of course is the widely recognized Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. You’ve heard of it haven’t you? Apparently this is the assumption – since it remains undefined.
Before reading farther I begin to wonder how this could be a major problem because it would require an unusual breakdown in surgical protocol to spread anything widely. Moreover – the logic was already in the land of non sequiturs.
To establish some clarity I recall visiting the Korean Airlines ticket counter at LAX the day after a bomb destroyed the El Al ticket counter just 20 feet away killing an airline agent and injuring a few would-be passengers (never heard of that? – It happened in 1974 when such things didn’t send the scurrying masses into a code red sort of panic). Arriving the very next day I didn’t feel threatened in the least since a tenable danger requires three elements…
- Physical proximity (visiting the counter).
- Functional agency (a bomb placed at the counter).
- Temporal alignment (visiting when the bomb explodes).
Delete any one of those three requirements (proximity, agency, or time) and there is very little danger left. Remove two, and I may as well worry about an asteroid landing on my head.
Back to the story…
The middle-aged Victorian man who carried the disease had sporadic, or classical CJD, which is the most common form of the illness and is not the type commonly known as mad cow disease.
Ah! Mad Cow Disease – now that ought to get everyone’s attention. CJD is not Mad Cow Disease we are told. And so by writing this, the reporter is yelling,
“THERE is NO FIRE!!”
We also learn how this CJD is the sporadic variety, but there’s no sense if that’s better or worse than a non-sporadic form – common enough to be known as the most common form of the illness yet alarmingly uncommon enough to warrant newsprint.
Adding to the main text is the unpleasant sidebar on the same page…
The illness has no known cure, treatment or diagnostic test.
So no matter who might have contracted CJD, there is no way of knowing anything for sure until the patient dies and his brain is cut open.
Wonderful.
Here’s a summary of what follows…
After careful study of the situation administrators of Royal Melbourne Hospital decided to mail 1,056 letters to former patients who might have contracting CJD by way of any possibility – conceivable or otherwise.
Now for the journalistic kicker – the point of the whole story is the reporter’s concern over the handful of letters that did not somehow reach their intended addressees. Two letters in particular were discovered undelivered along with four letters sent overseas without confirmation.
And by my tally – these six comprise the totality of the “many still unaware…”
The journalist then goes about interviewing the very two people known to have missed their mail deliveries (thereby eliminating 1/3 of the ‘many’)…
Brad Shorten, who had surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in March after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a nail gun, had not received a letter from the hospital yesterday.
“I heard about it last night and I’ve been a bit stressed,” the 34-year-old from Sunbury said. “My wife rang me at work today and said she spoke to the hospital. They said they were going to refer to my files and just have a look and re-assess them. They say it’s very unlikely and all that, but I don’t want very unlikely, I want no chance,” he said.
The other previously uninformed patient is a teenager who’d been stabbed in the head at a party. Not to dwell on minor details, but personally I’d feel pretty lucky to be alive and functional after shooting myself in the head with a nail gun or finding myself stabbed in the noggin – sporadic CJD risk notwithstanding.
In an attempt to quell popular distress the hospital set up a hotline that was quickly overrun with calls to the point where people couldn’t get through. When they did get through they were offered a free doctor’s visit or recommendation to see their own personal physician – none of whom could properly diagnose CJD unless given permission to remove the brain from the worried caller (which might have helped in the worrying aspects, but nothing much beyond that).
After the phone deluge subsided and once the murk had settled a bit, various Melbourne hospitals decided to continue brain surgeries with the following commentaries…
- The Royal Children’s Hospital will resume elective neurosurgery today after the National CJD Incident Panel advised its risk of contamination was effectively zero.
- On Monday night, the hospital canceled elective surgery for yesterday after discovering one boy had brain surgery at the Royal Melbourne, then more at the Royal Children’s.
- Hospital chief executive Tony Cull said surgical instruments would undergo increased high-level sterilization as a precaution before surgery resumed.
- After a wave of calls from worried patients, St Vincent‘s Hospital reassured the public that a patient with CJD treated late last year did not have surgery, so there was no risk of surgical contamination.
- And the Austin Hospital said a patient with CJD who had brain surgery in 2001 was treated only with instruments disposed of immediately after surgery, so nobody had been put at risk.
In the end, the citizens of Melbourne now know the following…
There is a danger of eventual death, the immediate risk is exceedingly remote, and no matter who might be at risk – if anyone at all – there is nothing to be done about it.
Perhaps I am pointing out the obvious here – minus the artificially inflamed panic this pretty much describes ordinary life.
