Premature death has returned to political rhetoric.
It is, of course, an election year. Politicians say things in election years they later wish they had not.
But they shouldn't get carried away with concepts as sensitive and easily misconstrued as premature death.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) boiled over on the subject in an Earth Day broadside against the "polluter-friendly" environmental record of US President George W. Bush.
"From clean air to mercury to MTBE [methyl tertiary butyl ether] to clean water, today's report [on Bush's environmental policies] finds that time after time the president has sided with polluters over the quality of life of the American people," Kerry's campaign said in a statement.
"The consequences of this careless environmental record have been severe, resulting [sic] in 21 million more tons of pollution in our air, 100,000 more premature deaths, 112,000 toxic waste sites that still need to be cleaned, and lakes and streams across the country that remain too polluted for fishing or swimming."
Voters will decide whether the US is as trashy as Kerry makes it sound and whether Bush deserves the blame. The statement and reports appear on the campaign web site at www.johnkerry.com.
The concern here is polemic abuse of an arcane risk metric.
Bush's environmental policy has not made 100,000 people die before their time. But that's what Kerry's statement implies. And it's a serious charge.
It's so serious a charge, in fact, that the Kerry campaign should have to explain it.
What, exactly, were the causes of all these deaths? By what criteria have they come to be considered premature? How were they counted?
Who were the victims? Where were they laid to rest?
These questions have no answers, of course. Premature mortality is just a statistical tool of risk assessment.
When politicians start throwing around numbers of premature deaths, however, they create impressions that are frightening and false. Inserting them into a catalog of accusations just amplifies the misconception.
Even in an election year, political argument should meet some standard of legitimacy. Politicians should leave environmentally related premature death to the specialties in which it means something.
(Online Apr. 30, 2004; author's e-mail: [email protected])
