If symptoms
persist.. .
MAN'S origins, so we are told by anthro- pologists who find bones in caves and are able therefrom to reconstruct our distant past, were on the savannahs of east Africa. Judging by my one experi- ence of big-game hunting there, armed with a gun, it must have been terrifying to hunt all those big, fierce animals armed only with sticks and stones.
The capacity for terror must have been to some evolutionary advantage, and so it is not altogether surprising that man, though his conditions have changed somewhat since earlier times, is still run- ning scared. The modern equivalent of hunting on the savannahs is, of course, shopping in the supermarkets; and terror lurks in the passageways between the shelves so neatly piled with produce.
What is modern man scared of as he shops? Cancer, mostly. He knows that somewhere in those alluringly packaged products lurks the chemical which will bring about his downfall, putting an end to his life, which would otherwise have been without end. It is common knowl- edge that we live in dangerous times, carcinogenically speaking.
Last week, the Daily Mail performed a sterling service for British shoppers: it temporarily focused all their anxieties on a single product, apple juice. Some brands of this unappetising beverage had been found to contain higher than the recommended concentrations of patulin, a carcinogen; and suddenly, despite the fact that one would have to drink 100 litres of apple juice daily to endanger one's health in any way, no buyers could be found for. Our supermarkets had to offer their perfectly safe drink at a knock-down price, but people avoided it ,as they would lepers in Africa; but when, during a debate on the matter in the House of Commons, Miss Glenda Jackson, the member for Hampstead and Highgate, rose to say that the mothers of Hamp- stead were very worried about apple juice, I knew that it was completely safe.
The week before it was revealed in most of our newspapers that the use of mobile telephones had been linked to cancer of the brain. This health scare was in a slightly different category, since users of mobile phones are not very pop- ular, being assumed either to have important business interests or to be drug dealers setting up deals. The British hate any sign of prosperity in their fellow citizens, and therefore greeted the news with some pleasure, as God's judgment upon the yuppies; but the rapid spread of mobile telephones may well be slowed by the fear of brain tumours.
In the same week, a woman won £15,000 from her employer for damage caused by passive smoking. She worked in an office where everyone else smoked, as a result of which she was unable any longer to sing in a choir, among many other deleterious effects; and the employer — though not admitting legal liability — paid up. Henceforth, employ- ers would be well advised, from the financial point of view, to forbid their employees to smoke. Personally, I am ambivalent about this development. fat aesthetic reasons, I dislike cigarette smoke: but I also find it alarming that the health terrorists have won, and will no doubt soon turn their attention to something else.
There are now health scares almost every week (as well as miracle cures for previously fatal diseases which we are statistically most unlikely to get). Botulism from tinned salmon, spina bifi- da from green potatoes, schizophrenia
from flu during gestation, heart attacks from soft water and lack of fish all,:
everything is grist to the mills 01
hypochondriacal neurosis, which grind exceeding small. One might be forgiven for forgetting that our life expectancY has tripled since the 18th century, to saY nothing of our reduced experience of pain and physical suffering.
A general practitioner in South Wales, Dr Julian Tudor Hart, has proposed what he calls the 'inverse care law': that health care is bestowed upon people in inverse proportion to their need for it. propose an inverse preoccupation with illness law: the healthier people are, the more preoccupied they are by trivial threats to their health.
As for the purveyors of health scares, their lives acquire meaning and purpose through campaigning. How delicious it Is to be always on the side of the angels against the powers of evil!
Theodore Dalrymple
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