HL Deb 12 January 1998 vol 584 cc115-6WA
Lord Stoddart of Swindon

asked Her Majesty's Government:

Whether they will publish the risk factors relating to:

  1. (a) eating any cut of British beef;
  2. (b) eating British beef on the bone;
  3. (c) food poisoning;
  4. (d) choking on food;
  5. (e) being involved in a road accident;
  6. (f) drinking alcohol above recommended safe limits;
  7. (g) death or injury during childbirth;
  8. (h) smoking;
  9. (i) death or disease from sexual activity.

Baroness Jay of Paddington

Risk factors can be interpreted in more than one way. First, there are the factors which predispose an individual to a risk which can include genetic makeup, gender, behaviour, environment—including social and economic factors, age and pre-existing illness. Some commentators tend to quote figures in order to compare risks. Many have become wary of making such comparisons for a number of reasons; because it is often impossible to compare like with like and because there are different perceptions of the risk, but also because different risks affect different sections of the population and because some risks are voluntarily accepted. In some cases the extent of the risks is simply not known.

In its advice to Ministers the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) said that using pessimistic assumptions concerning the various factors involved in the transmission of BSE to humans it is estimated that the risk from the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) in food is now very small. On the basis of the risk assessment available to the committee it estimated that there is a 95 per cent. chance of no cases and a five per cent. chance of one case of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease arising as a result of this exposure in

Line listings of general foodborne outbreaks in England and Wales are published on a quarterly basis in the Public Health Laboratory Services Communicable Disease Report CDR Weekly. Information on contributory factors associated with reported general outbreaks in England and Wales for the period 1992–1994 can be found in the CDR Review. Copies of these publications are available in the Library.

There were 286 deaths in England and Wales in 1996 from choking on a foreign body, however it is not recorded how many of these were food related.

There were 3,621 deaths and over 300,000 injuries from road traffic accidents in the United Kingdom in 1995.

There is no universally acceptable figure available on the number of deaths related to drinking alcohol because of the difficulty in defining the term alcohol-related. Estimates in the academic literature range between 5,000 and 40,000 deaths per annum and reflect a wide range of methods of calculation.

The UK maternal mortality rate, as quoted by the Office of National Statistics, is 6.0 deaths per 100,000 maternities (1991–93, the latest figures available).

The risk of an individual dying in any one year from smoking 10 cigarettes per day (all smoking related diseases) has been estimated as 1 in 200.

Since reporting began in 1982 to the end of October 1997, there have been 9,114 deaths of people with AIDS reported to the Public Health Laboratory Service's Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, where infection was probably acquired from sexual intercourse. Deaths due to other non HIV/AIDS sexually transmitted infections are estimated to be about one per cent. of the AIDS deaths.