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?

or lack of experiences. To wit, "I had lead toys as a kid and, well, I turned out okay." In fact this is precisely what I told myself when I scanned the beach for killer sand holes. Look, I had spent parts of every summer of my life--maybe a year total--at the beach, and, well, I turned out okay. In fact, I had never witnessed, never even heard of the collapsing sand phenomenon.

But I knew after talking to Fischoff and Slovic that this was mostly self-delusion, and not nearly enough for the analytical part of my brain to override the intuitive part. I’d need more to stop worrying about the beach eating my kids. So I decided to try to put math up against the myth. To come up with some rigorous analysis, and relatable images that would, finally, scotch the dread.

The sand story quotes a Harvard doctor who witnessed a collapsing sand event and who has been making awareness of it his personal crusade ever since (the intuitive response to risk, like parents pulling their kids off the bus). The doctor even published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine to raise awareness of “the safety risk associated with leisure activities in open-sand environments.” In the letter, he documents 31 sand suffocation deaths and another 21 incidents in which victims lived, occurring mostly over the past 10 years. He believes these numbers are low because he based them only on news reports that he could find.

Using rough math, let’s assume he’s right that there were more cases, and double his figures, guesstimating 60 deaths and another 40 cases where victims lived over the past decades. That’s 100 cases total, or about ten per year, including six deaths and four more where the victim lived. Of course, not everyone on the planet goes to the beach, so let’s say that the beachgoer population comprised only one percent of the world population in the last year, about 60 million people. (In fact it’s probably higher than this, but assuming a smaller number of people at the beach to begin with actually makes the risk per person higher.) With this conservative estimate of beach-goers, there would be six deaths by sand per every 60 million beachgoers. One in 10 million beachgoers are likely to die in a sand hole.

That seems unlikely, but how unlikely? I’m still imaging the numerato