Until last week I didn’t have much time for Ben Goldacre, the Guardian journalist and author of Bad Science. He devotes his life to the exposure of snake oil salesmen, whether nutritionists with bogus qualifications or practitioners of alternative medicine, pointing out that there is no scientific basis for their claims. A useful service, to be sure, but he suffers from the Guardian columnist’s vice of being overly puritanical. He combines superciliousness with moral superiority, as if ignorance and stupidity are to be condemned rather than pitied. He is a self-proclaimed atheist, but exhibits a near religious attachment to the empirical method.
So what’s changed? The answer is that my three-year-old son Freddie has come down with chicken pox. I happen to know a bit about the varicella zoster virus because it almost killed my eldest son Ludo. Caroline was exposed to the virus less than a week before he was born which meant she transmitted it in utero without passing on any antibodies. Newborns are immunocompromised and as a result Ludo spent the first four weeks of his life in and out of paediatric wards. The mortality rate for neonatal varicella if left untreated is 31 per cent.
Luckily for Freddie, the risks associated with chicken pox fall dramatically after the immune system starts to work properly. Indeed, if you’re going to get chicken pox, you’re better off having it as a child than as an adult because the risk of developing life-threatening complications is lower.
Of course, not all parents know this and there have been times during the past week when I’ve felt a Ben Goldacre-style rant coming on. For instance, I took Freddie to the new playground in Ravenscourt Park last Saturday and was scolded by a yummy mummy for being ‘irresponsible’. I tried to persuade her I was doing her child a favour but she wasn’t convinced.
Even more irritating are those parents concerned about their children being re-infected. One mum cancelled a play date with Freddie, explaining that she couldn’t face the prospect of her son getting chicken pox for a second time. When I told her that 99.9 per cent of people who’ve had chicken pox are safe from re-infection she was completely incredulous. ‘But I’ve had it twice myself,’ she said.
I then embarked on a conversation that I’ve had at least a dozen times since in which I attempted to explain the difference between shingles and chicken pox. Shingles is a skin rash that you can develop if you’ve had chicken pox, but isn’t triggered by exposure to someone infected with the disease. A fairly simple distinction you would have thought, but one that surprisingly few people are able to grasp. The general attitude towards Freddie among most of the parents I know is that he is best avoided even if their children have already had chicken pox.
The defence these parents come up with is that even if the risk of re-infection is infinitesimally small it is still not worth taking if the cost of avoidance is insignificant. It is a similar argument to the one made by parents who don’t want to risk giving their children the MMR vaccine — a particularly detestable group in Ben Goldacre’s eyes. Andrew Wakefield is almost certainly wrong, but why take the chance when the cost and inconvenience of giving your child the vaccines separately is so low?
Anyone who’s studied philosophy will recognise this as Pascal’s Wager and it’s the form of reasoning used by nearly all parents who are risk-averse on behalf of their children. Problem is, it only gives the appearance of being rational. In reality, the probability of a child getting re-infected with chicken pox — or developing autism from the MMR vaccine or being bitten by a fox — is almost zero and, consequently, almost any cost associated with avoiding such risks is too high. Case in point: it costs over £1,000 to vaccinate your children separately for measles, mumps and rubella in a Harley Street clinic.
Having seen my son adversely affected by the public’s poor grasp of the risks associated with chicken pox I can understand where Ben Goldacre gets his prosecutorial zeal from. It’s not people’s ignorance that is so infuriating — that’s excusable — but their conviction that they’re right. After the week I’ve had, I think I’m going to give all my friends a copy of Bad Science for Christmas.
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