Nina Shapiro

“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.”
― Nina Shapiro, MD, Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice—How to Tell What's Real and What's Not