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Excellent discussion of absolute and relative risk in the context of alcohol safety. "But claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but government do not recommend that people avoid driving."

how could two groups of 'experts' come up with such different conclusions, given they broadly agree of the evidence? David Aaronovitch in the Times identified the critical underlying issue behind the ensuing conflict: whether we take an individual- or a population-based approach. Essentially, the authors point out that any absolute risks are small from an individual perspective, and may generally be cancelled out by the enjoyment of eating, and the bother of changing habits. But these small benefits can be important from a public-health, population-wide perspective, since a lot of people making a small change, that only reduces their risk by a personally-negligible amount, can add up to thousands fewer cases of disease. That's what has generated the disagreement. It can be perfectly reasonable for guidance to be given by authorities, and it can also be perfectly reasonable for individuals to ignore it. Both can be 'right'.

Medicine's decades-long march toward patient autonomy means patients are often now asked to make the hard decisions - to weigh trade-offs, to grapple with how their values suggest one path over another. This is particularly true when medical science doesn't offer a clear answer: Doctors encourage patients to decide where evidence is weak, while making strong recommendations when evidence is robust. But should we be doing the opposite?People in general are not great at evaluating risk. They worry more about shark attacks than car crashes.

How excited would you be about a medication that lowered your risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke by 1.5%? Excited enough to spend a few thousand dollars a year on the drug? I expect not. What if, instead, the drug reduced those same terrible outcomes by 20%? That's probably enough benefit to interest some in the drug. Well, those statistics come from the same clinical trial, evaluating the same drug. In fact, they present the exact same results, but they simply do it in different ways.

Today's Examine dives into the maths. We'll look at the best estimates on catching and being injured by COVID-19, the chances of being harmed by the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the other broader risks and benefits. Hopefully, at the end of this, you are armed to make a better decision.

almost all the stories I looked at emphasized that "1 in 10 pregnant women" with Zika gave birth to babies with birth defects.But how many actual women does the "1 in 10" figure represent? How many actual babies with birth defects?You have to wade far down into all of these stories to find the numbers, whereas NPR puts them right in its headline:51 Babies Born With Zika-Related Birth Defects In The U.S. Last YearThe fact that 1 in 10 women with Zika have babies with birth defects is accurate but not nearly as informative as it could be.And when communicating to a general audience, it's misleading to the point of scaremongering to make the "1 in 10" headline the take-home message from the study.