CSO Disclosure Series | Reporter's Notebook: The United States of TMI

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us?

r. I’m seeing that one kid die, that teenager playing football who disappeared before his friends’ eyes. I’m thinking of his mother, grieving, and saying desperately in the story, "People have no idea how dangerous this is."

I need something better, some kind of image. I found this oddly pretty graphic at the website for the National Safety Council (which hasn’t credited the designer):

Here, the size of each circle represents the relative likelihood of dying by the listed cause. One of every five deaths is from heart disease, so that circle is 20 percent of the overall circle (represented by the red arc), which represents chances of death by any cause, one in one. The stroke circle is about five times smaller than the heart disease one, as the risk is about one-fifth as common and just four percent of all deaths. The circles continue to get smaller down through rarer and rarer causes of death. The smallest circle on this particular map is death from fireworks discharge, a fate suffered by one of every 350,000 people just a few pixels on the screen.

On the above graphic, the circle for suffocation by sand would be almost 30 times smaller than the fireworks circle. Invisible, which is fitting since experts call such risks "vanishingly small." What’s more, it would be nearly 10,000 times smaller than the circle for "drowning.” In other words, when I’m at the beach, I should be thousands of times more worried about the ocean than the sand--and even then, not too worried about either.

But I’m still not quite convinced. The problem with vanishingly small risks is they’re just that, hard to see, even in your mind. Once the circle disappears, it’s hard to understand how much smaller it’s getting.

So I need an image with which I can relate to all of the proportions. How about an Olympic-size swimming pool? If causes of death were represented by the 660,000 gallons of water in that pool, then heart attacks would take up 132,000 gallons, enough to fill about 15 tanker trucks. Death by fireworks discharge would take up roughly two milk jugs of the pool’s water.

And of all that water in the swimming pool, dying in a sand hole would take up about 17 tablespoons, less than nine ounces.

photo of kid on beach I CAN’T CONTROL the rapid rise in risk disclosure, or the ubiquitous access to all of it. It’s probably not going