Timandra Harkness on the latest “scare the shit out of people with blatant propaganda” campaign in Britain:
To put that another way, the campaign is suggesting that if 48,000 women all drank two large glasses of wine every night (it doesn’t specify for how long — a year, 20 years — this is a health campaign after all, so why would we need to see proper research citations?), then out of those assiduous drinkers an extra two would die in a year because they drank more than the government guidelines suggest.
It’s a classic case of RRSHS — Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome. Why bore people with a sober assessment of how likely something is to kill them when you can scream a terrifying figure at them instead? So what if they’re far more likely to die of something else?
And in fact, moderate drinking offers significant protection against heart disease, which kills one in three of us. ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me half as likely to die from a heart attack’, the plasticine figure could truthfully have said.
RRSHS is a variant of the “science by press release” variant of junk science.
Update: Tim Worstall loses his cool over the statistical lies being bandied around in this particular Nanny campaign:
Prime Minister David Cameron is known to have sympathy with the idea of minimum pricing, which medics say could save nearly 10,000 lives per year if set at 50p per unit.
Gosh, that’s amazing.
Alcohol related deaths in the UK rose to 9,031 in 2008, up from 8,724 the previous year.
Rilly? A slight rise in the cost of cheap booze will save more lives per year than are lost to all booze?
Hey, why not put it up to £50 a unit and we’ll all live forever?
Forgive me the crudity but I’ve really had it with cunts lying to get their bandwagons rolling.
And in the comments, “PJH” says:
One wonders, of course, if these figures are created in the same way as alcohol related admissions to hospitals.
“30% of this death was due to alcohol, 10% of that teetotaller’s death was due to alcohol, 14.243245% of that other death…”
