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Time
Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.
It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day.
The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40 percent more common than those that strike later in the day.
There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong.
We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the United States, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year.
We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap.
"We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."
At the same time, 20 percent of all adults still smoke; nearly 20 percent of drivers and more than 30 percent of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.
We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas -- and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot.
Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
Dread skews response
Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.
For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.
The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.
The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.
We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way.
Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less.
In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.
The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again.
But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky.
"People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
"But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."
編者的話：以下是這周《時代》雜誌的封麵故事
如果每天沒有那麽多想把你殺死的東西的話，你享受你的生活會容易的多。
在你還沒完全醒來之前問題就開始了。從床上跌下來每年殺死６００個美國人。清早的心髒病發作幾率比在白天的發作幾率高４０％。
有從樓梯上掉下來的摔死的， 吃香腸也會噎住你的氣管，你離開家時滑倒在街邊人行道，你每天的上下班是高速的汽車碰撞遊戲。
因為我們生活在死亡的陰影裏，你會認為我們會學會從那些長期統計學上才有意義的事件中分辯出那些對我們幾率大的危險。但是你可能錯了。
我們被迄今為止精確地說還沒有殺死一個美國人的禽流感所折磨， 但我們卻不得不被哄去打普通感冒疫苗，而普通感冒每年殺死３６，０００個美國人。
我們對可能存在於（實際上幾乎肯定沒有）我們的漢堡包裏的瘋牛病病原感到緊張，同時卻對能導致我們當中７００，０００人死於心髒病的膽固醇不怎麽擔心。
我們對我們是唯一的能理解危險概念的物種而感到驕傲，而我們卻有著一種隻擔心可能性很小的事而忽視可能性大的事的糟糕的習慣。我們建造障礙來遠離認識到的危險同時卻把自己暴露在真正的危險之下。
買東西的人仍然對一包菠菜不敢正視，因為害怕E. coli細菌，而同時又把他們的采購車裝滿吸滿脂肪的炸薯條和裹滿鹹鹽的nachos. 我們往水龍頭上裝過濾器，在我們家裏裝空氣離子淨化器，用滅菌肥皂洗澡。
“我們過去精確到用百萬分之幾去量汙染物，”Dan McGinn,這位曾經是前國會山職員，現在的私人危險顧問說。“現在是十億分之幾。”
同時，百分之二十的成人仍然吸煙；接近百分之二十的駕駛員和超過百分之三十的後排乘客不使用安全帶；我們三分之二的人肥胖。
我們衝過街口的紅燈，把我們的家建在颶風多發區－－而且當我們的家被風暴摧毀後我們又在原地重建。
對真實世界的危險的明智的計算是一個多維的數學問題。這個問題有時看來超出了我們的能力之外。雖然可能真的這是我們永遠也不可能做的很好的事，但這幾乎肯定卻是我們能學會做得更好的事。
恐懼歪曲了反應
哪些危險受到了過度的注意，哪些被忽視依賴於一係列因素。可能最重要的是恐懼。
對大多數動物來講，所有的死亡都是一樣的。你被獅子吃了或被河水淹死，你的大草原就結束了。這不是人類看事情的方法。
事情帶來的疼痛或痛苦越厲害，人們就容易害怕它；死得越幹淨或越快，我們就覺得不怎麽害怕。我們越害怕，我們就越緊張，這樣我們計算這事實際發生的幾率就越不精確。
這對比如說艾滋病和心髒病來講是對的。艾滋病一點一點奪去你的生命，而心髒病可以在幾秒之內殺死你。事實是每年死於心髒病的美國人是死於艾滋病的美國人的幾乎５０倍。
我們也害怕災難性的危險，就是那些一次就可以奪去好多條性命的危險。與之相對的是長期的慢慢的殺死人的危險。
不熟悉的危險也同樣比熟悉的危險可怕。下一次E. coli爆發可能不會象前一次這麽讓你擔心，而且在這之後的爆發給你造成的煩惱會更輕。
從一些方麵考慮，這是一件好事，特別是如果最初的反應過度了的話。但是這也是不可避免的,因為我們有適應於任何讓人煩惱的刺激的趨勢，從疼痛和悲傷到響個不停的汽車警報。
適應的問題是它也可以把我們帶到另外一個極端，就是不是擔心太多而是擔心太少。９１１事件卡特裏那颶風要求人們建起堅固的城牆來抵禦這些悲劇再次發生。
但是不論怎樣發誓，新奧爾良和整個國家的安全設施仍然有危險的漏洞。
“人們把這些危機稱作叫醒的電話，”哥倫比亞大學Mailman公共健康學院助理院長， 國家災難預警中心主任Irwin Redlener博士說。
“但是它們更象是隔一會兒還會響的鬧鍾。我們是警覺了一下，但我們並沒有當回事。”