Wow – what a great essay. As often occurs, Arts & Letters Daily found this one. More sorry than safe

‘If everything we did had to be absolutely safe, risk-free, proven to have no adverse outcomes for anyone or anything, we’d never get anywhere. Buildings wouldn’t go up, planes wouldn’t get off the ground, medical breakthrough would come to a standstill, science would be stifled…. Shall I go on?’

Professor Sir Colin Berry is not a big fan of the ‘precautionary principle’, the idea that scientists, medical researchers, technologists and just about everybody else these days should err on the side of caution lest they cause harm to human health or the environment. Berry is one of Britain’s leading scientists; he has held some of the most prestigious posts in British medicine, including head of the Department of Morbid Anatomy at the Royal London Hospital from 1976 to 2002. Now he watches as his ‘good profession’ threatens to be undermined by what he says is an ‘unscientific demand’ to put precaution first.

The entire essay describes a phenomenon that we should all understand. A couple of interesting examples should make the general point.

For Berry, the precautionary principle most clearly becomes a potential life-threatener when applied to the third world. He becomes especially animated when we discuss the outbreak of cholera in Peru in the early 1990s. In 1991, an epidemic of cholera, which had earlier been eradicated in Peru, claimed around 6,000 lives and caused illness among another 800,000. It spread from Peru to Columbia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala. Berry describes it as ‘one of the major epidemics of the twentieth century’, and says precaution played a part in causing it.

It has since been discovered that the epidemic was, in part, a result of the Peruvian authorities’ decision to stop chlorinating drinking water supplies – and that one reason they stopped doing this was because reports issued by the American Environmental Protection Agency had claimed there was a link between drinking chlorinated water and an increased risk of cancer (a link which the EPA has since admitted is not ’scientifically supportable’). ‘Chlorinated water would have prevented the outbreak’, says Berry. ‘The water production and cleaning system had gone wrong before the outbreak, so it wasn’t just that they stopped chlorinating water and then, bang, cholera arrived. But in a deteriorating situation, the failure to chlorinate – based on the principles of precaution and bad science – helped to make things a whole lot worse than they might have been.’

and

Berry points to the restrictions imposed on DDT – the pesticide used to get rid of malaria-carrying mosquitoes – as another example of how the ‘application of precaution’ can cause death and disease. In some third world countries where malaria had been all but eradicated over the past 20 years, there have been epidemics of the disease since DDT was restricted. Currently malaria is on the rise in all the tropical regions of the planet; in 2000, it killed more than one million and made 300million seriously ill. ‘Campaigners claimed that DDT was bad for the environment; they said that it caused harm to American birds of prey. I’m sorry, but why should people in the third world at risk from malaria care about American birds of prey? Decisions about these things should be based on local needs and on empirical evidence.’

Take the time to read the entire article. I believe it worth your time. It certainly was worth mine.

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