Famous Health Scares

Lethal Tomatoes

Scare April 1812: Tomatoes are poisonous and will kill you.

Fact Although Italians had been growing and eating tomatoes since 1550, Americans didn’t start eating them until around 1830 because they were widely thought to be poisonous. Legend has it that Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson introduced the tomato to Salem, Massachusetts, by publicly eating a basket of tomatoes in the town square. He drew quite a crowd of gawkers, who expected to watch him die. 

Result Can you imagine food without tomatoes? Pizza Hut might
be called Flat Bread Cheese Shack.

Don’t Pass the Cranberry Sauce

Scare November 1959: U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Arthur Fleming announced that a shipment of cranberries examined in San Francisco had traces of aminotriazole, a pesticide that hadn’t yet been evaluated by the government but hadn’t shown any danger. He casually warned, just fifteen days before Thanksgiving, that to be safe Americans probably shouldn’t buy cranberries at all until the chemical could be tested further. 

Fact The pesticide affected only a small portion of the total U.S. crop and wasn’t found to be dangerous. For a person to ingest the same amount of the chemical that lab animals received in testing, he would have to eat 15,000 pounds of cranberries every day for years.
Result Secretary Fleming’s offhand comment caused a panic about cranberries. The risk to humans from consuming cranberries was infinitesimal. On the campaign trail for the 1960 presidential election, Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy both consumed cranberries to show Americans that there was no danger.

Swine Flu Is Coming
Scare March 1976: A soldier at Fort Dix in New Jersey died from the “killer flu.” Americans were whipped into a frenzy by reports that an epidemic was about to hit the United States. President Ford authorized a $135 million immunization program, and about 40 million Americans received shots. 

Fact The soldier was the only person to die from the virus, and no epidemic developed. In a tragic irony, the vaccine itself caused an adverse reaction in some people, sickening hundreds and killing twenty-five—more than the disease itself.
Result This is probably the biggest overreaction to a health scare in our history and highlighted the power of the modern media to generate health hysteria. What’s referred to by many health experts as the “Swine Flu Fiasco” is said to have diminished Americans’ faith in health pronouncements from the government and rocked our confidence in the government to respond prudently to a potential largescale contagious outbreak.

Coffee Causes Cancer
Scare February 1981: A study claimed that drinking two cups of coffee per day doubles your chances of getting pancreatic cancer, while drinking five cups per day triples your risk. 

Fact The flawed study was published by a Harvard doctor whose findings could never be reproduced. There has not been any evidence since to suggest that coffee causes cancer. 

Result Unbelievably, coffee sales were not affected by the study. This illustrates the danger that can come from putting too much emphasis on the results of a single study.

Cell Phones and Brain Tumors
Scare 1990: An urban legend circulated and was picked up by the media that magnetic fields produced by a cell phone will cause brain tumors.
Fact While it is not possible to prove that electromagnetic fields (EMF) are safe, they have never been clearly linked with cancer. 

Result Incidence of brain tumors has risen slightly in recent years, but not in proportion with the increase of cell phone use. The real danger of cell phones is using them while driving. Drivers using cell phones are four times as likely to have an accident as nonusers.

Bird Flu Pandemic
Scare Summer 2005: Fear spread that a lethal strain of flu would migrate from birds (no pun intended) to humans, causing a worldwide pandemic and killing millions of people. 

Fact Common flu strains often go from birds to humans and are not necessarily lifethreatening. The most recent bird flu strain causing concern, H5N1, has been linked to the deaths of slightly over a hundred people who came into direct contact with poultry, primarily in Asian and Eastern European countries. While scientists are concerned that the virus may gain the rare ability to be transmitted from human to human, which might cause a widespread flu epidemic, there is currently no evidence that this has occurred. 

Result Being prepared for an epidemic of any kind is a challenge for the health care system in every country. The difficulty comes in deciding how much money and resources to direct toward a health problem that in all probability will never materialize, when at the same time millions of people aren’t being treated for conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma—conditions that are killing people every day.

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