“By worrying about our health, we jeopardize our well-being, increasing our risk for conditions including heart disease, cancer, stroke, and depression,” states Marc Siegel, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine in his article “The Irony of Fear” reprinted in the “Third Age, Health & Wellness” at www.thirdage.com, an internet newsletter.
Relatively minor threats are widely feared, he said, such as the West Nile virus, which killed only 284 people in 2002. “Pneumonia, on the other hand, killed 63,000 Americans in 2000 and drew little attention and little public comment. People worried about severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which emerged in Asia, but fewer than 100 died in the United States from it.”
Each terror alert triggers a wave of often unjustified fear. Anthrax infected 22 people through the U.S. mail in the fall of 2001, killing 5. Yet, 30,000 people began taking the powerful antibiotic Cipro indiscriminately and without a prescription. Threats of smallpox raced virulently through the public when reports circulated that some rogue dictators or terrorists might get their hands on the virus. However, there has not been a case of smallpox in the United States since the 1940s, and if it does reappear, it will likely spread slowly.
Siegel says that fear isn’t something you can just turn off. He says it’s part of our psychological makeup, integral to the elaborate system of self-protection that has preserved the human species for millennia. But, he argues that the fear component of that system has been malfunctioning.
Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Our garbage is removed quickly. We live temperature-controlled, largely diseases-controlled lives, and we worry more than ever before. Even though the natural dangers are no longer there, the response mechanisms are still turned on much of the time.
What has gone awry? The mass media tends to magnify the latest health concern and broadcast it to millions of people at once. This has the effect, he says, “of provoking panic way out of proportion to the risks. I call this phenomenon the ‘bug du jour.’ The craze of the moment appears to be a threat until it runs its course in the spotlight,” and that creates stress.
The acute stress response, popularly known as “fight or flight,” was first described by American physiologist Walter Cannon in the 1920s. Cannon observed that animals, including humans, react to threats with a hormonal discharge. There is an outpouring of vessel-constricting, heart-thumping hormones, including noradrenaline (norepinephrine) and adrenaline, followed by the steroid cortisol. The heart speeds up and pumps harder, the nerves fire more quickly, the skin cools and gets goose bumps, the eyes dilate to see better, and the brain receives a message that it’s time to act.
Byron Y. Newman, O.D.
New York neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux described the amygdala, the almond-shaped brain structure that interprets emotion, as “the hub of the brain’s wheel of fear,” in his book describing how the brain processes emotions. Ledoux adds that when the amygdala is stimulated, there is an outpouring of stress hormones, causing a state of hypervigilance. The amygdala processes the primitive emotions of fear, hate, love, bravery and anger—all neighbors in the deep limbic brain. When the amygdala malfunctions, a mood disorder, or state of uncontrollable apprehension, results.
In the October 2005 issue of American Journal of Public Health, there were a few letters discussing fear and the impact of misdirecting precious dollars to bioterrorism preparedness by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC); money that was diverted from public health funds needed to combat an army of extremely important diseases and public health matters, ranging from diabetes to heart disease, from tobacco use to physical inactivity, and to one of the worst epidemics in the history of the United States—overweight and obesity, which now affects 2 of 3 adults and is responsible for an estimated 300,000 premature deaths annually. These problems adversely affect millions of people each year.
This letter by Kathryn C. Dowling, Ph.D., M.P.H. and Robert I. Lipton, Ph.D., M.P.H. of the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, CA compared that statistic with the anthrax incident of 2001, which killed 5 people, prompting an ill-conceived, expensive, smallpox vaccination campaign, which also caused the deaths of 3 health workers. They conclude that “it is clear that the current massive misfunding of terrorism preparedness over public health has real-world implications for mortality and morbidity.”