Public Misunderstanding of Health Risks is " a Good Thing " According to Some in the Tobacco Control Movement

Somewhere along the line, I must have gone astray. During my master ' s in public health program, I was taught that one major goal of public health is to educate the public about the risks of various exposures. I was also taught that accurately communicating these risks, as well as helping the public to accurately understand the relative risks between different hazardous behaviors or products was critical.Well, based on an editorial published this morning in theJournal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)Network Open, I was misguided. For in this editorial, it states that the increasing public misunderstanding of the relative risks of smoking compared to vaping is " a good thing. "The editorial responds to new research also published this morning in the same journal which documents that the majority of adults in the U.S. completely misunderstand the dangers that smoking poses compared to those posed by vaping and furthermore, that the proportion of people with this misunderstanding has been growing substantially over time. (See: Huang J, Feng B, Weaver SR, Pechacek TF, Slovic P, Eriksen MP. Changing perceptions of harm of e-cigarette vs cigarette use among adults in 2 US national surveys from 2012 to 2017.JAMA Network Open. 2019;2(3):e191047).According to the study, in 2012, only 39.4% of adults perceived e-cigarettes as less harmful than real cigarettes. This is pitiful, given the overwhelming scientific evidence that vaping is much less hazardous than smoking. But eve...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs