David Ropeik Quotations

Simply put, would you rather die of a heart attack or a shark attack? So what scares us, kind of enthuses or excites the media that it might be an exciting story that resonates with people. And, yes, they do play those stories up because of that factor.

That's the silver lining in the terrible thousand-mile-wide cloud of that storm.

You have a much greater risk of being attacked by a dog,

We should be concerned about medical errors, not the kind when a doctor leaves a scissors in you, or cuts off the wrong arm, but nurses not washing their hands and spreading infections, prescriptions not filled out accurately. Medical errors are attributed to causing as many of a 100,000 deaths a year in North America,

The risk you can't do anything about feels scarier than the one you can. Washing your hands a lot, sneezing into your elbow, knowing that avoiding crowded places if there's a flu epidemic of any kind, those are applicable. They're emotionally reassuring in the face of some new threat. New threats are always scarier than ones we've lived with for a while. It's just their newness.

Being overly concerned about going in the water or taking a walk in the woods, and less concerned about the things that human society can do to you could be dangerous to your health.