Mad Cows and Mother's Milk: The Perils of Poor Risk Communication. 2nd ed.

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

In this second edition, three essays have been added to the original
seven on environmental health and environmental protection: one on BSE
(mad cow disease), another on the Kyoto Protocol and climate change, and
a particularly valuable contribution on genomics (the risks in the
manipulation of life). All of the essays are well informed and of high
intellectual quality.

The analytical framework of the book is that governments and businesses
(i) analyze risks to human health, (ii) communicate risks to the public,
and (iii) institute measures (principally regulations) to address the
risks assessed and communicated. The principal thesis is that things go
wrong because of poor risk communication, so that the public
misperceives the risks and doubts the efficacy of the measures adopted
to address them.

When the authors’ arguments are analyzed, however, it turns out that
poor risk communication is only one of many flaws in the process—and
rarely the most important one. In the case of BSE, governments
miscalculated the risks, then produced regulations that were not
commensurate with the real risks, then failed to enforce them. The
result was a social and economic disaster, occasioned by the failure to
regulate properly what was originally a minor risk to animal and human
health.

In other cases, it is the authors’ own analytical framework that is
the problem. For instance, the treatment of agricultural biotechnology,
written with the help of Angela Griffiths and Katherine Barrett,
concludes that risk–benefit analysis has broken down and that a new
framework is needed to address the genetic modification of organisms.
Here, the implication is that the authors’ analytical framework is not
the only one that is scientifically feasible and appropriate for the
various hazards addressed in the book. So we have a paradox: the authors
are among the most powerful Canadian minds in the area of environmental
risk, yet their own prescriptions in regard to addressing such risks are
ones that are neither the singular nor the best approach to
public-health hazards—even when the business of communication is done
properly.