Half Changed World

Last Friday, the Washington Post website carried a pair of stories about senior citizens afflicted by the hurricanes.  One discussed the sequence of events at a nursing home in New Orleans that failed to evacuate in the face of the hurricane warnings.  Twenty-two people died.  The other reported on the bus that exploded, carrying senior citizens from  a Houston nursing home, evacuating in the threat of Rita.  Twenty-four people died.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I’m not arguing that the governmental preparations for Katrina, or the immediate response, were appropriate.  There were major screw-ups at many levels, no doubt.  But I have some sympathy for the planners, because figuring out how to prepare for this sort of high consequence, low probability event has got to be one of the hardest tasks there is in public policy.  If you mobilize fully every time there’s a risk, you’re going to sound a lot like Chicken Little.

In grad school, we did an extended policy exercise around the 1976 swine flu scare.  It’s a useful cautionary tale.  As with today’s worries about a bird flu pandemic, this was a case where experts were convinced that there was a high likelihood of an outbreak of a flu variety that no one living had been exposed to, with fears that it could resemble the deadly 1918 epidemic.  HEW undertook a massive vaccination campaign in the fall of 1976, with over 40 million people vaccinated.  However, the vaccination campaign was called off in mid-December, as reports started coming in of cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome among people receiving the vaccine.  The anticipated epidemic never occurred, and the federal government was widely criticized for exposing people to a dangerous vaccine. 

Last week, Mieke emailed me to draw my attention to her post about lead found in soft vinyl lunch boxes.  Her post is based on a report from the Center for Environmental Health which is suing the makers and retailers of kids’ lunchboxes in which they found excessive levels of lead in an assortment of kids’ lunchboxes that they tested.

As it happens, I read her email about half an hour after I had ordered D a Buzz Lightyear lunchbox.  (His teachers have asked that we provide him with a full-sized backpack, and while I was ordering the backpack, I decided for an extra $5, we could spring for the matching lunchbox.)  So, what am I going to do?  Am I going to throw it out?  Or spend as much as the lunchbox itself cost on a lead test kit?  Or give my precious child a potentially toxic bag?

Probably the last.   I read the CEH press release carefully, and it never says how many lunchboxes they tested, or what fraction tested high.  My guess is it’s a fairly low percentage, or they would have said.  And, as they said:

"The levels CEH found in the lunch boxes are not high enough to cause acute lead poisoning during normal use. However, if your child is exposed to lead from other sources, a leaded lunch box would add to their health risk."

As a basis for comparison, the amount of lead any child is likely to be exposed to through a lunch box is small compared to what every one of my generation and earlier breathed as a result of leaded gasoline.  I’m not criticizing Mieke or anyone else who wants to test their child’s lunchbox.  I’m glad that CEH is keeping the manufacturers’ honest.  But I’m not going to worry about it myself.

Except at 2 am.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.