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Time
Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.
It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day.
The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40 percent more common than those that strike later in the day.
There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong.
We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the United States, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year.
We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap.
"We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."
At the same time, 20 percent of all adults still smoke; nearly 20 percent of drivers and more than 30 percent of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.
We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas -- and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot.
Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
Dread skews response
Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.
For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.
The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.
The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.
We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way.
Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less.
In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.
The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again.
But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky.
"People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
"But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."
编者的话：以下是这周《时代》杂志的封面故事
如果每天没有那么多想把你杀死的东西的话，你享受你的生活会容易的多。
在你还没完全醒来之前问题就开始了。从床上跌下来每年杀死６００个美国人。清早的心脏病发作几率比在白天的发作几率高４０％。
有从楼梯上掉下来的摔死的， 吃香肠也会噎住你的气管，你离开家时滑倒在街边人行道，你每天的上下班是高速的汽车碰撞游戏。
因为我们生活在死亡的阴影里，你会认为我们会学会从那些长期统计学上才有意义的事件中分辩出那些对我们几率大的危险。但是你可能错了。
我们被迄今为止精确地说还没有杀死一个美国人的禽流感所折磨， 但我们却不得不被哄去打普通感冒疫苗，而普通感冒每年杀死３６，０００个美国人。
我们对可能存在于（实际上几乎肯定没有）我们的汉堡包里的疯牛病病原感到紧张，同时却对能导致我们当中７００，０００人死于心脏病的胆固醇不怎么担心。
我们对我们是唯一的能理解危险概念的物种而感到骄傲，而我们却有着一种只担心可能性很小的事而忽视可能性大的事的糟糕的习惯。我们建造障碍来远离认识到的危险同时却把自己暴露在真正的危险之下。
买东西的人仍然对一包菠菜不敢正视，因为害怕E. coli细菌，而同时又把他们的采购车装满吸满脂肪的炸薯条和裹满咸盐的nachos. 我们往水龙头上装过滤器，在我们家里装空气离子净化器，用灭菌肥皂洗澡。
“我们过去精确到用百万分之几去量污染物，”Dan McGinn,这位曾经是前国会山职员，现在的私人危险顾问说。“现在是十亿分之几。”
同时，百分之二十的成人仍然吸烟；接近百分之二十的驾驶员和超过百分之三十的后排乘客不使用安全带；我们三分之二的人肥胖。
我们冲过街口的红灯，把我们的家建在飓风多发区－－而且当我们的家被风暴摧毁后我们又在原地重建。
对真实世界的危险的明智的计算是一个多维的数学问题。这个问题有时看来超出了我们的能力之外。虽然可能真的这是我们永远也不可能做的很好的事，但这几乎肯定却是我们能学会做得更好的事。
恐惧歪曲了反应
哪些危险受到了过度的注意，哪些被忽视依赖于一系列因素。可能最重要的是恐惧。
对大多数动物来讲，所有的死亡都是一样的。你被狮子吃了或被河水淹死，你的大草原就结束了。这不是人类看事情的方法。
事情带来的疼痛或痛苦越厉害，人们就容易害怕它；死得越干净或越快，我们就觉得不怎么害怕。我们越害怕，我们就越紧张，这样我们计算这事实际发生的几率就越不精确。
这对比如说艾滋病和心脏病来讲是对的。艾滋病一点一点夺去你的生命，而心脏病可以在几秒之内杀死你。事实是每年死于心脏病的美国人是死于艾滋病的美国人的几乎５０倍。
我们也害怕灾难性的危险，就是那些一次就可以夺去好多条性命的危险。与之相对的是长期的慢慢的杀死人的危险。
不熟悉的危险也同样比熟悉的危险可怕。下一次E. coli爆发可能不会象前一次这么让你担心，而且在这之后的爆发给你造成的烦恼会更轻。
从一些方面考虑，这是一件好事，特别是如果最初的反应过度了的话。但是这也是不可避免的,因为我们有适应于任何让人烦恼的刺激的趋势，从疼痛和悲伤到响个不停的汽车警报。
适应的问题是它也可以把我们带到另外一个极端，就是不是担心太多而是担心太少。９１１事件卡特里那飓风要求人们建起坚固的城墙来抵御这些悲剧再次发生。
但是不论怎样发誓，新奥尔良和整个国家的安全设施仍然有危险的漏洞。
“人们把这些危机称作叫醒的电话，”哥伦比亚大学Mailman公共健康学院助理院长， 国家灾难预警中心主任Irwin Redlener博士说。
“但是它们更象是隔一会儿还会响的闹钟。我们是警觉了一下，但我们并没有当回事。”