October 2000 Fraser Forum: Playgrounds & Peanut Butter: Serious Childhood Risks?
When it comes to deciding how much protection to give our children, is there any such thing as too much? Not according to popular opinion, and certainly not according to the administrators at some Canadian schools. At one elementary school in Ontario, snacks on anything other than fruits and vegetables have been banned. The ban is intended to protect students who might have food allergies severe enough to cause anaphylactic shock (Gillespie, 2000). But what do the latest available statistics show? Not a single child between the ages of 5 and 9 died of anaphylactic shock in Canada between 1994 and 1997 (Statistics Canada, 1999). And what about the "playgrounds" example in our title? This summer, the Toronto District School Board spent $700,000 to demolish playgrounds at 172 elementary schools across the city (Coyne, 2000). Why? The board removed the playground equipment because it did not meet voluntary standards meant to apply to new equipment and retrofits. However, there have been no serious injuries or deaths on Toronto playgrounds since 1987, when records of such incidents were first kept. Replacing the playground equipment is estimated to cost $27 million. These two examples are symptomatic of bureaucratic efforts to satisfy the very human desire to eliminate risk, but serve as well to illustrate how misguided that impulse can be.
The stated goal of both of these policies, i.e. to reduce risks faced by children, is beyond reproach. However, decision makers’ apparent failure to consider the costs as well as the potential benefits of their policies warrants some criticism. This is tricky territory because some readers will think me callous to suggest that costs should be a consideration. Is not any action that might protect even one child worthwhile regardless of the cost? Not if alternative uses can be found for such expenditures, uses that promise even greater relief from danger for larger numbers of people. Because society’s resources are limited, spending to reduce one risk restricts our ability to spend on another.
A professor at the University of California provides a concrete example of how ignoring these trade-offs with alternatives can actually cost lives: "suppose we took away $45,000 per year from the money we spend regulating emissions at phosphorus plants and used it instead to screen the 20 percent of black newborns who are not now screened for sickle-cell anaemia. The effect on life expectancy of phosphorus plant workers would be negligible. However, black children would gain an additional 192 years of collective life expectancy every year" (Tengs, 2000). If the Toronto School district was willing to spend $27.7 million to raze and then rebuild playgrounds, and their ultimate goal was protecting children from risks, they should have first asked whether there were other uses for the money that would protect more children. For example, Statistics Canada recently released a report indicating that obesity among children, which has been linked to premature illness and death, rose to almost one in four in the last decade. Spending the money to promote physical fitness and healthy eating habits would likely have been a better investment.
No one denies that risk is an inherent fact of life. But taking action to reduce one kind of risk may open the door to even greater potential danger. For example, eliminating chlorine from drinking water to reduce the risk of cancer increases the more immediate risks from water-borne microbial diseases. Peruvians discovered this the hard way after their decision in 1991 to stop chlorinating drinking water caused a cholera outbreak which killed close to 7,000 people and affected another 800,000 (Graham and Wiener, 1995, p. 15). The decision was based, in part, on studies done for the US Environmental Protection Agency which showed that chlorine might pose a slight cancer risk. (The EPA later determined that there was no link between chlorinated drinking water and cancer.) Although this is a more graphic example than removing playground equipment or outlawing peanut butter, it does illustrate the same point. Great care must be taken if government officials are to be allowed to introduce regulations aimed at reducing one form of risk when such action may introduce even worse dangers. Weighing alternatives is serious business in a risky world.
Reconsider my earlier example where students are banned from bringing snacks other than fruits and vegetables to class. Even though no children between the ages of 5 and 9 have died from anaphylactic shock in Canada between 1994 and 1997, two children in the same age group died from choking during the same time period. Both risks are thankfully extraordinarily low, but choking to death seems to pose a greater risk. Since children are more likely to choke on raw fruits and vegetables than on many other snacks, banning other snacks may inadvertently pose a greater overall risk to children. Eliminating playground equipment has also introduced some risk-risk trade-offs. Parents know this instinctively. One father interviewed by a reporter for the National Post complained that children at one school, "desperate for somewhere to climb, scaled the railing behind a portable on the site yesterday morning and began swinging from the hydro wires" (Kuitenbrouwer, 2000). Another parent, quoted in the same article, worries that broken beer bottles left by teenagers who might start congregating in the open areas where playgrounds used to be will be more dangerous for children than the playgrounds that were removed.
Arguably the most important cost of many risk reduction strategies—loss of personal freedom—is often given short shrift. Its loss in a prosperous, peaceful time has been by attrition, not at the point of a gun. In thousands of small ways, such as allowing administrators to decide what our children can eat for lunch, we have empowered bureaucrats to dictate how we as individuals deal with risk. In so doing, we have invited Big Brother in through the front door and are trading off freedom—a most precious human value—for the often ineffective and unnecessary policing of risk.
References
Coyne, Andrew (2000). "Monkey-bar madness." The National Post. September 11.
Kay, Guy Gavriel (2000). "Playground hazards and legal minefields." The National Post September 13.
Gillespie, Gina (2000). "School bans all snacks except fruit, vegetables." The National Post August 26.
Graham, John and Wiener, Jonathon (1995). "Confronting Risk Tradeoffs" in Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and The Environment. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kuitenbrouwer, Peter (2000). "Demolition leaves barren wasteland." The National Post September 7.
Statistics Canada, Health Statistics Division (1999). Causes of Death, 1997 Catalogue No. 84F0208XPB. Minister of Industry: Ottawa.
_____ (1999). Causes of Death, 1996 Minister of Industry: Ottawa.
_____ (1997). Causes of Death, 1995 Minister of Industry: Ottawa.
_____ (1996). Causes of Death, 1994 Catalogue No. 84-208-XPB Minister of Industry: Ottawa.
Tengs, Tammy (2000). "Dying Too Soon: How Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Can Save Lives" in Safe Enough? Managing Risk and Regulation. The Fraser Institute: Vancouver.
"Trim the fat from an overweight society." The Vancouver Sun. August 29, 2000.
Wente, Margaret (2000). "Your children, safe at last." The Globe and Mail September 7: A17.
[The Centre for Studies on Risk and Regulation at The Fraser Institute has just released its first book, Safe Enough? Managing Risk and Regulation. Risk regulation—regulation that attempts to protect human health—has expanded dramatically since the 1980s. This book helps us understand why. It shows the importance of considering the costs of regulation and of basing decisions about regulation on sound science and economics. To order a copy (at a cost of $19.95 each plus shipping and handling and GST), call 1-800-665-3558, ext. 580.]
Laura Jones (lauraj@fraserinstitute.ca) is Director of Environment and Regulatory Studies at The Fraser Institute. She received her M.A. in Economics from Simon Fraser University.
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