The Probable And The Improbable

It seems that every so often a magazine prints an article about how we worry about stuff that has a low probability of happening (getting avian flu, in the example below) as a oppossed to things that might happen (getting common flu). This time it's Time and it is, as usual, worth reading:

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 U.S., 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.