Reporting risk
Media (mis)reporting of risk is one of my pet bugbears. A few years ago the Royal Society and others produced guidelines on responsible reporting of risk (available here. And the BBC also produced its own guidelines, with input from Kings College London.
The most fundamental of the guidelines is that relative risks should always be reported with absolute risks. For example, "listening to an iPod doubles risk of brain cancer" is a scary-sounding relative risk (and you can imagine the headlines!). But if the absolute risk is that "it increases it from one in a million to two in a million", then it is not so scary. And without that additional information about the absolute or baseline risk, people cannot make informed choices.
Unfortunately, only reporting relative risk continues to be epidemic among members of the fourth estate, despite the Royal Society and BBC guidelines...
So, for once, it's hats off to Jenny Hope, medical correspondent at the Daily Mail. Her coverage of increased cancer risk from moderate alcohol consump... actually includes a measure of absolute risk (albeit quite low down in the article, but it is there: "The lifetime risk for developing bowel cancer is one in 20 for men and one in 18 for women... two units of alcohol a day over time would change this risk to one in 16 for men and one in 14.5 for women").
Meanwhile, coverage in The Guardian (and many, many other outlets) blissfully reports the relative risk with no real attempt to set it in context with the absolute risk.
If you have any other good / bad examples of reporting risk in media stories, then let's bring them together here!
And I'm not exhonorating researchers from their responsibilities in this area either. Those Royal Society guidelines include guidelines for researchers (i.e. researchers need to make the absolute risk clear as well as the relative risk). The source of the pint-of-beer-raises-cancer-risk story, the World Cancer Research Fund, does seem to ignore that in its own press releases – as seen in this example (though "what is the absolute risk involved?" should be the first question that a responsible journalist asks).
The most fundamental of the guidelines is that relative risks should always be reported with absolute risks. For example, "listening to an iPod doubles risk of brain cancer" is a scary-sounding relative risk (and you can imagine the headlines!). But if the absolute risk is that "it increases it from one in a million to two in a million", then it is not so scary. And without that additional information about the absolute or baseline risk, people cannot make informed choices.
Unfortunately, only reporting relative risk continues to be epidemic among members of the fourth estate, despite the Royal Society and BBC guidelines...
So, for once, it's hats off to Jenny Hope, medical correspondent at the Daily Mail. Her coverage of increased cancer risk from moderate alcohol consump... actually includes a measure of absolute risk (albeit quite low down in the article, but it is there: "The lifetime risk for developing bowel cancer is one in 20 for men and one in 18 for women... two units of alcohol a day over time would change this risk to one in 16 for men and one in 14.5 for women").
Meanwhile, coverage in The Guardian (and many, many other outlets) blissfully reports the relative risk with no real attempt to set it in context with the absolute risk.
If you have any other good / bad examples of reporting risk in media stories, then let's bring them together here!
And I'm not exhonorating researchers from their responsibilities in this area either. Those Royal Society guidelines include guidelines for researchers (i.e. researchers need to make the absolute risk clear as well as the relative risk). The source of the pint-of-beer-raises-cancer-risk story, the World Cancer Research Fund, does seem to ignore that in its own press releases – as seen in this example (though "what is the absolute risk involved?" should be the first question that a responsible journalist asks).
Views: 0
Latest Activity
Robert N Slinn posted a status"'Physical Methods' chapter in print, also Thomson Reuters report 'The Changing Role of Chemistry in Drug Discovery' researched and published"
© 2012 Created by Claire Ainsworth.
Powered by
