Focusing on the Real Issues

Throughout Deadliest Enemy: Our War on Killer Germs, Osterholm and Olshaker emphasize that what scares us most and what is actually the biggest threat to us are not always the same things. They say that people are easily distracted, and that on-going threats that continuously cause the greatest loss of life actually fade into the background of most people’s minds, while newer, flashier problems catch people’s attention for a brief time, before they move on to the next thing.

Osterholm introduces the readers to the concept of threat matrices, in Chapter 4, “The Threat Matrix.” He defines a threat matrix as a type of scale with two axis that is used to determine how much of a threat various events or possibilities are relative to each other. Epidemiologists intentionally create threat matrixes to compare disease threats. On one axis, they measure how great...