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Lost In Translation: What Epidemiologists Get Wrong In Communicating With the Public
I’ve been an epidemiologist for 14 years, and I still make some of these mistakes when translating epidemiological findings to the public.
Humans are weird when it comes to assessing risk. We’ll avoid air travel, choosing instead to travel by vehicle clear across the country not only because of the cost of air travel but because of fears of the plane crashing. In fact, when two airplanes crashed in 2018 and 2019, a whole fleet of airplanes was grounded and many people felt afraid of flying a “737” type of airplane. (It was the “737 Max” type that crashed, not all 737s.)
When we polled teenagers on their use of vaping products, they told us that tobacco (in the form of smoking) was bad for them, but they had no issues in vaping nicotine. (Nicotine is very addictive, and it can cause many problems in developing brains.) This is because they saw vaping as less dangerous than smoking, but they couldn’t see that vaping was more dangerous than not vaping. It seemed that no one had told them of any dangers to vaping, not until the 2019 outbreak of vaping-related lung injuries. Even then, the use of vapes continued to increase, “popcorn lung” be damned.
