SUSAN OKIE
Alcohol drinking, smoking, speeding, ubproteced sex, not having annual flu shots all tend to have their risks underestimated, while pesticides, and florine in water are percied to be more dangereous than they really are. That is not to say that they are not dangerous at all, they are but most people percieve much greater levels of risk than is real, while with the risks that they can easily control by their own behavior most of us subtantially under rate the danger.
Susan Okie is a family physician and an award winning medical journalist. While a student at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s, she began writing about medicine and health for the Washington Post. She has spent most of her career at that newspaper, covering local and national medical news, reporting for 3 years from Africa and serving as the national science editor. She recently became a Washington-based contributing editor for the New England Journal of Medicine, writing about medical and health issues. Okie lives with her husband and two sons in Bethesda, Maryland.
