The book assesses panics in over 40 areas: family life (including marriage breakdown, the lack of children and sex), health (obesity, salt and MMR jabs), hobbies (drinking to dangerous art), society (pensions, debt and migrants), the workplace (globalisation, women's pay and stress), law and order (including murder and terrorism), the natural world (extreme weather, global warming and rising sea levels), declining resources (overfishing and species extinction), modern science (nano technology, GM and radiation), and even asteroids and aliens.
We have scored each subject using a points system to show how vividly each threat is portrayed in the media, how real the threat is and how much we as individuals can do about it.
The birth dearth - the shortage of babies
Italian men not helping much around the house is apparently one of the principal reasons why Italian women are producing so few babies. Other reasons for the birth rate of Italian women falling to be among the lowest in the world include the lack of flexible work, a shortage of nurseries and the poor provision of children's services, in a country where couples have traditionally relied on families for support. A low birth rate might seem an unlikely problem for a predominantly Catholic child-loving country, but a serious shortage of babies and the prospect of a shrinking population is affecting many developed countries, to such an extent that it could soon threaten their livelihood and viability. Mass immigration, not always seen as desirable in the West, might become a necessity. The prospect of too few people is a far cry from the impending "population crisis" that most of today's adults were brought up with.
Becoming unsettled - climate change
Climate change is arguably the most serious issue we confront in this book. It may not have a sudden or immediate impact but it does threaten to affect us all, which has made it the media's most sustained, enduring and infectious panic story. Newspaper usage of the phrase 'global warming' has been increasing by a steady annual 60 per cent in recent years. It was mentioned 16,755 times in the British press alone during June-August 2006, but it's the same everywhere.
'Be worried. Be very worried', cautioned the cover of Time, showing a polar bear peering over the edge of a very small ice floe. Even the doughty Economist decided that 'The heat is on'. Both magazines dedicated special surveys to the topic in 2006. The flow of alarmist headlines has become so copious that one think tank was prompted to lash out against 'climate porn'.
How much should we worry? Is climate change a greater threat than terrorism, as British government's chief scientist David King has insisted in his effort to ram home the danger? Almost certainly, it is - and not only because the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is actually very small. But threat of what?
The housing bubble - soaring house prices
Panic about the housing market is widespread and comes in two particular forms -- first, there is the worry that prices are so high that people who are not already home owners will be permanently excluded from the market and, second, there is the worry of the economic consequences of a fall in prices should the so-called "bubble" burst. Either way the large increase in prices in recent years will leave us with a nasty hangover -- the only uncertainty being which problem we have to live with and the nature of the
social and economic crisis coming our way.
Art is dangerous
Artists have always relished the idea that their work is 'dangerous'. Picasso, Duke Ellington and Anthony Burgess are among those who have made this claim in as many words. But the artist's idea of what makes a work dangerous is perhaps not quite the same as everyone else's.
When Carsten Höller became only the seventh artist to fill the vast turbine hall of London's Tate Modern art gallery in October 2006, his temporary installation was greeted not with the usual gasps of awe but with whoops of glee from most - and trepidation from a few. The Times was most concerned. Was the piece: 'Art - or accident waiting to happen?' Höller's work, Test Site, was essentially a set of five glorified helter skelters, finely constructed in stainless steel and clear plastic. The longest of the slides was 55 metres and it took just twelve hair-raising seconds to descend through its chutes and spirals. But were gallery visitors taking the ride possibly on 'a slippery slope to disaster'?
Terror alert - security fears
Fancy seeing the pyramids? If so, the opening line of the travel advice of the web pages of the UK’s Foreign Office will probably put you off: "There is a high threat from terrorism. Attacks can be indiscriminate and against civilian targets, including places frequented by foreigners." It doesn't sound very promising, does it? But then again, there is similarly gloomy advice for other places, such as Morocco or Turkey, where Europeans seek some winter sun in their thousands. The situation is worse in other potential holiday destinations such as Thailand and Indonesia (including Bali), as in both cases the Foreign Office advice omits the reassuring phrase: "Most visits are trouble-free". Is the situation that bad? Is the Foreign Office is erring on the side of caution?
A dead duck - bird flu
After a winter of increasingly hysterical press coverage of the risk of a human pandemic, Britain at last experienced the reality of bird flu when, at the end of March 2006, a single dead swan washed up onto the beach at Cellardyke on the east coast of Scotland. The bird tested positive for the type of the virus designated H5N1, present in many bird populations and which had led to dozens of human fatalities across Asia. It was with almost palpable relief that the Daily Telegraph was able to declare on its front page 'Britain's first bird flu zone', complete with a map showing a '1,000 square mile area at risk'. Like Chekhov's seagull or Ibsen's wild duck, the bird was surely an omen: the next autumn migration season would bring squadrons of sickly foreign birds plummeting from the skies to spread their deadly infection to anything and anyone within range. More than a year on, we are still waiting.
The fat thing - obesity
Obesity is a favourite panic story - the media love everything to do with the subject. Even responsible newspaper editors find stories on the subject as resistible as a child finds a chocolate bar. The story might be serious - obesity shortens life and costs national health systems substantial funds - but there is also a lighter side - stories suggesting that we will all soon be too fat to fit into airline seats and too heavy to be carried to our graves on pallbearers' shoulders. "The fattest children in the world", was the grabbing headlines that told us that one-third of Scottish 12-year-olds are overweight and that one-fifth are obese. The kids are fuelled by fizzy drink and unfamiliar with fresh fruit, it seems. A spokesman for the International Obesity Task force was quoted as saying: "The obesity epidemic is escalating totally out of control in Scotland", adding that this "is more than just a warning signal, it's a red light."
That's when it hits you - asteroid strike
You might want to put this date in your diary: 13 April 2029. It's a Friday. Friday the 13th. This is the day, NASA announced in 2004, on which the Earth is most likely to be struck by a civilization-destroying asteroid. On Christmas Eve 2004, the space agency quoted odds of one in 300 - an unprecedented level of risk - that we would be hit by the recently discovered 2004 MN4, a 400-metre diameter chunk of rock orbiting around the sun. Later that day it dramatically shortened the odds to one in sixty-three. By the end of Christmas Day, the chance of the planet being largely wiped out stood at one in forty-five. On the Torino scale, asteroid watchers' newly invented equivalent of the Richter scale, 2004 MN4 rose from a zero to a two and then to a four. These may be long odds for betting on a horse, but they are uncomfortably short when you consider what's at stake.