The Agriculture Department is investigating a possible case of mad cow disease, the agency’s chief veterinarian said Saturday….

Worried?   You shouldn’t be.   Not at ALL.   Very close to ZERO.  Why?   Only ONE American has died from Mad Cow and he got it in Britain.  Only about 150 died in Britain years ago from a major outbreak.   DO THE MATH and fire up the BBQ.
I’m now convinced to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that humans are extremely crappy at mathematics, and even worse at digesting the *implications* of mathematics.    These are not skills evolution selected for aggressively and therefore it’s a daily dose of “Houston, we have a problem!”
We routinely allocate risk improperly, especially as it related to dangerous activities.   For most people the big dangers – and they are fairly substantial – are things like getting into a car (about a hundred people die each day from car accidents), Handling guns (if you include suicide gun deaths this is also close to 100 deaths per day in the USA.

Are You a smoker?   DANGER!  Obese or just Overweight with a BMI over 24.9?  Your DANGER of heart disease and earlier-than-otherwise death is very real.

YET…. I know of few people who worry much, if any, about these real dangers, preferring nonsensical concerns about things like getting struck by lightning, earthquakes, or terrorism.

Terror stats have a tricky caveat in that baselines are very hard to establish. HOWEVER, even if we assumed that the awful toll of 9/11 was to happen globally on a DAILY BASIS, our current terror related expenditures would be better spent on global healthcare if return on our investment was the key metric.  Why?   Because many more people die daily from preventable disease than died on 9/11 from terror.    Diarrhea and Malaria alone kill over 10,000 humans per day – mostly children.  PER DAY!

Mad Cow worries?   Silly – you are more likely to be killed by a perfectly normal cheeseburger’s tendency to raise your chances of heart disease.