West Nile Fear Rises Again
Time to fire up the fear engine:
With another summer upon us, the media is again abuzz with news about the West Nile virus. News agencies across the nation are offering tips and advice on how to avoid contracting the disease. Advice ranges from the pragmatic (drain water on your property) to the impracticable (limit time outside at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active). Innumerable experts have been consulted and their consensus is clear: be afraid, very afraid.
So begins a column from AFF Brainwash that provides a critical reminder that what the media tells us to fear isn't always so fearsome:
If you get bit by a mosquito infected with the West Nile virus, there’s a 20 percent chance that you’ll develop West Nile fever. Even if you bit by a mosquito infected with the West Nile virus (not likely) and you develop West Nile fever (even less likely), there’s just a one in 150 – .67 percent – chance of developing a severe illness!
Doesn't sound so scary now, does it?
The problem, of course, is that the media fear machine leads to expensive attempts to mitigate this miniscule threat, diverting resources that would be better used to deal with real threats (or...shocking thought...perhaps government could let us keep our money instead of spending it on attempting to eradicate vanishingly small risks). According to the article, federal and state officials spent tens of millions of dollars last year, between efforts towards a human vaccine, and mosquito control.
Is that a good use of funds? The article never answers yes or no, but rather points out that there are clearly less expensive ways to do more to save lives:
Unfortunately, a limited budget means doing finite good in society. Each lifesaving technique has a different cost-effectiveness: it costs just $39 per life saved to install defibrillators in emergency vehicles for resuscitation after cardiac arrest, but it costs $18 million per life saved to strengthen buildings in earthquake-prone areas. While it's easy to say which costs are worth it, it can be hard to say which are not.
Is WNV intervention worth it? Perhaps, the answer pivots on information that we don't have. To know if we’re making any progress we need to know how many mosquitoes are infected in the general population. At $20 a pool, taking samples is cost prohibitive. So instead, we test what we can and hope that the millions of tax dollars spent on public intervention is doing something.
Unfortunately, one of the consequences of a population that is generally ignorant of both basic economics and statistics and probability is that it makes it much harder to recognize government spending that sounds good (eradicate West Nile risk), but may turn out to be a very poor bargain, particularly given what we're not doing with the resources spent.