Tempest in a teapot

[unixronin]

The health blog on the New York Times has a column about the deadly danger to small children posed swallowing by various types of button-cell batteries.  This terrible danger happens THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER YEAR!!!  Well ... OK, maybe a few hundred ... no?  Ten to a dozen?

Well, OK, ALMOST ten.  ...Over the past six years.

Three hundred and forty million people, more or less, in the United States.  And in any given year, one or two of them swallow a button-cell battery and die as a result.

So, let's see ... how does that compare to other common risks?  No, wait: let's compare to RARE risks.  Oh, yes, here we go:  You are fifty times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning in any given year than you are to die from swallowing a button-cell battery.

But wait, not everyone who swallows a battery dies.  What about all the children that don't die, but still suffer serious injuries?

Well, the article says that's about a hundred people per year in the US at present, up from about fifteen per year in 1985. Out of three hundred and forty million.  That's, um ... gee. 130 times less than the number of people aged fifteen and under injured on those deadly, death-trap contrivances, bicycles, each year.  (About 13,000 in 2009.)  Hell, it's almost the number of 15-and-unders killed on bicycles in 2009 (93).

Well, we all knew bicycles were dangerous.  How about something nice and safe like the school playground?

ZOMG!!!  About two hundred thousand playground injuries per year among the 14-and-under set, about 90,000 of them severe (fractures, concussions, internal injuries, amputations etc).

Well, OK ... how about food?  Food's nice and safe, isn't it?

Well ... since you mention it ... actually, not so much.  WebMD says between 66 and 77 children under 10 die each year after choking on foods, and 10,000 children under age 15 are treated in emergency departments. Three quarters of those are children under 3 years old.  Even more deaths and choking injuries result from "swallowing balloons and small toys".

But Ms. Parker-Pope thinks we have an imminent crisis that desperately needs attention, because one to two people per year are dying from ingesting button cell batteries and maybe a hundred are being seriously injured.  We need to secure all battery compartments, everywhere, right away.

Or then again, Ms. Parker-Pope, maybe we could all start paying attention again to what our kids are getting into.  And maybe you could find something productive to do with the time on your hands, of which you appear to have rather too much if you have time to get all in a tizzy about a hazard so rare that, frankly, it's lost in the statistical noise.

Sometimes I swear we're actively breeding people for stupidity.

Comments

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

The Seebees have already gone on record to state that they have nothing...yet.

Ditto, ACE. [Who, despite their negative cachet here in Atlanta, are damn good]

As for delay: Yes, there was. It's unconscionable, and a large chunk of it is directly attributable to bad information from BP/Halliburton.

Dubya never impressed me as a businessman, but that's another issue.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Look, the whole thing has become obscenely academic: by the end of this summer, the oil will have drifted out into the Atlantic and maybe also into the Caribbean, wrecking ecosystem after ecosystem, fishery after fishery, as it goes, triggering an ecological disaster on a scale humanity has never seen before. The result of that will impact the global economy so terribly that it could trigger all-out nuclear war as nation after nation tries to grab rapidly dwindling resources to feed their own people, and the hell with everyone else. Next to that, everything pales into insignificance. Yet ditherers like the lady who's all upset over those batteries still clutter up the landscape, doing nothing useful, distracting us all from doing whatever constructive can be done about the things that really do matter.

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Probably, by the end of the summer, the public will only be aware of the next American Idol [is that still on] or somesuch other bread & circus crap.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

That depends how great the rise in prices of good is in this country by then. Which will take place, only the degree of the rise being uncertain. Though the oil will only do immediate harm to marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, and, probably, the Caribbean, it will also severely impact the livelihoods of countless people in that area, and in trying to compensate for lessened availability of sea food, people will have to use more and more of other products. As demand for food products increases, the prices of them will rise. Add that to the inflation we're already seeing, and we could be in bad trouble by then. And that's when hoi polloi will begin to notice how the situation has evolved, and what it means for them.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

hysterical much? Nuclear war? C'mon... deep breaths.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Read any history? Or Malthus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus)? When people are starving, or even think they're about to be starving, they'll do whatever they can to feed themselves and their children -- especially their children. And what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico -- and, soon, the Atlantic and the Caribbean -- will have an impact on the global economy large enough to dwarf the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Gulf of Mexico is so large that its destruction -- and it is in the process of being destroyed right now, as one ecosystem within it after another collapses and takes more down with it -- will trigger an ecological chain reaction that will spread throughout the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. If you doubt me, go ask a professional ecologist. Or just start looking up websites of biological scientists who are desperately seeking ways to stem the worst of what's going on and about to happen in that region. People all around the Gulf of Mexico are losing their livelihoods because of it. Come Autumn, they and their children will be going hungry, perhaps lose their homes and all else they own, because of the ongoing collapse of an already shaky economy in the region. If Obama somehow manages to take every asset BP owns and convert it to cash and give that cash to everyone living and working along the Gulf of Mexico, it won't be a tenth, a hundredth, of what will be needed to give them back what they have lost and will lose. And then there are the losses of species unique to the Gulf of Mexico, species whose habitats consist of tiny little volumes of ocean that are their sole home, that exist nowhere else on Earth, and the ecosystems they are part of. Those can't be replaced, not with all the money in the world. They are irreplaceable treasures whose loss no amount of money can make up for (for more on which, see, e.g., http://polaris93.livejournal.com/2248904.html, http://polaris93.livejournal.com/2040665.html, http://polaris93.livejournal.com/2036447.html). All that is in the process of being lost, and the economic, ecological, and other impacts on the world will be anything but negligible. If you think that isn't true, check out the websites of those biologists and ecologists, especially those whose fields include marine biology and marine ecology. If you think that won't have a deadly impact on the human world, you have to be dreaming. Hysteria? Hysteria is generally a determined refusal to face reality. All right, here's reality. Refuse to look at it as you will, it will catch up with you -- and everyone else in the world -- within 12 months, and probably within the next 6 months.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

Speaking of history. Funny thing about projected Worst case Scenarios. They never seem to happen. But fever dreams are good literature, I'll grant you that.

This is bad. This is very, very very bad. This is not an extinction level event with ICBMs flying around.

Also, valium...good stuff.