![]() The week prior, 530 hospitalizations had been reported. So far this year the number is 805-with a median age of 23-according to a widely discussed report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week. Push alerts mark incremental tallies in people hospitalized with serious respiratory illnesses related to vaping. Similarly accepted are the fatal effects of inhaling chemicals in air pollution, which kills about 7 million people around the world annually.Īt the moment, the leading public-health issue in the news is vaping. The annual death toll is now so expected that it does not constitute news. But it does so gradually with cancers and heart disease that strike after decades of use. Smoking tobacco, for instance, kills some 480,000 Americans every year. ![]() Anxiety can mobilize people to swift and decisive action, of the sort no longer considered for more dangerous threats that society does accept. Despite any ongoing plague of death and destruction, this sort of new, unanticipated danger invariably captures national attention.Īnxiety is a powerful motivator, but by definition it exists around risks that are not deemed acceptable. Cases involved people who are not supposed to die of the flu-not just the grandparent with emphysema, but the high-school athlete. Unlike in most years, swine flu hospitalized many young adults. Social scientists have since explained the panic as a matter of “ risk acceptability.” What made that flu stand out in people’s minds? In part, who it killed. The average annual death toll over the past decade has been closer to 50,000. Influenza killed about 12,500 Americans that year. ![]() In fact, the year that swine flu struck was one of the lightest flu seasons in recent history. But swine flu ultimately did no more damage in the country than any typical flu virus. Many Americans still remember that winter as particularly treacherous. Graphic, tragic tales of lives lost spread fear. A variant of the influenza that spreads every year, the “swine flu” made headlines as new reports of deaths rolled in. in 2009, killing thousands of people, panic felt especially necessary.
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