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There are countless illustrations of our confused and confusing relationship with risk. The single greatest risk factor for breast cancer is age— the older the woman, the greater the risk—but when a 2007 survey by Oxford University researchers asked British women when a woman is most likely to get breast cancer, more than half said, “Age doesn’t matter.” One in five thought the risk is highest when a woman “is in her 50s”; 9.3 percent said the risk is highest “in her 40s”; and 1.3 percent said “in her 70s.” A grand total of 0.7 percent of women chose the correct answer: “80 and older.” Breast cancer has been a major public concern and topic of discussion since at least the early 1990s, and yet the survey revealed that the vast majority of women still know nothing about the most important risk factor. How is that possible?

In Europe, where there are more cell phones than people and sales keep climbing, a survey found that more than 50 percent of Europeans believe the dubious claims that cell phones are a serious threat to health. And then there’s the striking contrast between Europeans’ smoking habits and their aversion to foods containing genetically modified organisms. Surely one of the great riddles to be answered by science is how the same person who doesn’t think twice about lighting up a Gauloise will march in the streets demanding a ban on products that have never been proven to have caused so much as a single case of indigestion.

In Europe and elsewhere, people tremble at the sight of a nuclear reactor but shrug at the thought of having an X-ray—even though X-rays expose them to the radiation they are terrified might leak from a nuclear plant. Stranger still, they pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity to fly somewhere distant, lie on a beach, and soak up the radiation emitted by the sun—even though the estimated death toll from the Chernobyl meltdown (9,000) is actually quite modest compared to the number of Americans diagnosed with skin cancer each year (more than one million) and the number killed (more than 10,000).

Or compare attitudes about two popular forms of entertainment: watching car races and smoking pot. Over a five-year period, NASCAR drivers crashed more than three thousand times. Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001 was the seventh fatal smashup in seven years. Governments permit NASCAR drivers to take these risks, and the public sees NASCAR as wholesome family entertainment. But if a NASCAR driver were to relieve post-race stress by smoking marijuana, he would be subject to arrest and imprisonment for possession of a banned substance that governments worldwide have deemed to be so risky that not even consenting adults are allowed to consume it—even though it is impossible for someone to consume enough to cause a fatal overdose.

The same logic applies to steroids and other forms of doping: One of the reasons that these substances are banned in sports is the belief that they are so dangerous that not even athletes who know the risks should be allowed to take them. But in many cases, the sports those athletes compete in are far more dangerous than doping. Aerial skiing—to take only one example—requires a competitor to race down a hill, hurtle off a jump, soar through the air, twist, turn, spin, and return to earth safely. The slightest mistake can mean a headfirst landing and serious injury, even a broken neck. But aerial skiing isn’t banned. It’s celebrated. In the 2006 Olympics, a Canadian skier who had broken her neck only months before was lionized when she and the metal plate holding her vertebrae together returned to the slopes to once again risk paralysis and death. “I would prefer my child take anabolic steroids and growth hormone than play rugby,” a British scientist who studies doping told the Financial Times. “I don’t know of any cases of quadriplegia caused by growth hormone.” The same is all the more true of American football, a beloved game that snaps the occasional teenage neck and routinely turns the stars of the National Football League into shambling, pain-racked, middle-aged wrecks.

Handguns are scary, but driving to work? It’s just a boring part of the daily routine. So it’s no surprise that handgun killings grab headlines and dominate elections while traffic accidents are dismissed as nothing more than the unpleasant background noise of modern life. But in country after country—including the United States—cars kill far more people than do handguns. In Canada, twenty-six people die in car crashes for every one life taken by a handgun. And if you are not a drug dealer or the friend of a drug dealer, and you don’t hang out in places patronized by drug dealers and their friends, your chance of being murdered with a handgun shrinks almost to invisibility—unlike the risk of dying in a car crash, which applies to anyone who pulls out of a driveway.

Then there are the kids. There was a time when children were expected to take some knocks and chances. It was part of growing up. But no more. At schools, doors are barred and guarded against maniacs with guns, while children are taught from their first day in the classroom that every stranger is a threat. In playgrounds, climbing equipment is removed and unsupervised games of tag are forbidden lest someone sprain an ankle or bloody a nose. At home, children are forbidden from playing alone outdoors, as all generations did before, because their parents are convinced every bush hides a pervert—and no mere statistic will convince them otherwise. Childhood is starting to resemble a prison sentence, with children spending almost every moment behind locked doors and alarms, their every movement scheduled, supervised, and controlled. Are they at least safer as a result? Probably not. Obesity, diabetes, and the other health problems caused in part by too much time sitting inside are a lot more dangerous than the specters haunting parental imaginations.

And of course there is terrorism. It is the bête noire of our age. Ever since that awful day in September, terrorism has utterly dominated the agenda of the American government and, by extension, the agenda of the entire international order. George W. Bush has said nothing less than the survival of the United States is at stake. Tony Blair went further, saying the whole West faces a danger that is “real and existential.”

And yet in the last century, fewer than twenty terrorist attacks killed more than a hundred people. Even the September 11 attacks—which were horribly unlike anything seen before or since—killed less than one-fifth the number of Americans murdered every year by ordinary criminals. As for the doomsday scenarios that get so much play in the media, the only time terrorists ever managed to acquire and use a genuine weapon of mass destruction was the 1995 nerve gas attack in Tokyo. The culprits, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, were wealthy and had the services of skilled scientists. The target, the crowded subway system, was ideal for a gas attack. Twelve people died.

Compare that to the toll taken by the considerably less frightening specters of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other common ailments. On average, 36,000 Americans are killed each year by the flu and related complications. Obesity may kill around 100,000 each year. Hundreds of thousands die annually simply because they don’t have access to “the most valuable preventive health services available,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.

These risks are not new or darkly glamorous. They’re not even terribly complicated or little-known. We have made enormous advances in human health, but so much more could be done if we tackled them with proven strategies that would cost little compared to the benefits to be reaped. And yet we’re not doing it. We are, however, spending gargantuan sums of money to deal with the risk of terrorism—a risk that, by any measure, is no more than a scuttling beetle next to the elephant of disease. As a direct result of this misallocation of resources, countless lives will be lost for no good reason.