Risky business

It was on the long coach ride home from France that I started to get the DTs.  

Or rather the DVTs in the sense of…what happened to it?

Not that long ago, there seemed near hysteria around the possibility of deep vein thrombosis after a flight or – for the more impoverished – a cramped, long-distance coach journey.

People bought expensive elasticated socks and did strange, mid-flight exercises.  And there were lots of reports, it seemed, of people dying a few days after returning from holiday. 

Which is better, I guess, than dying a few days before a holiday.  

But now, DVT seems to have gone the same way as bird flu or SARS (remember that one?). 

I’m not under-estimating the potential seriousness of DVT, but interested in the way health scares ebb and flow in the media and public mind. 

But then mankind has a poor track record of evaluating risks accurately.  There’s a greater chance, for instance, of dying in a car crash on the way to the airport than during the flight.  But people don’t rationalise it that way.

It reminds me of my favourite lottery story from the geneticist Steve Jones.  He said he was saving his £1 a week, rather than buying a ticket, until he had enough for an insulated helmet.  Because there’s more chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery.