The scare over genetically modified food has been a classic example of a little-studied phenomenon, the media feeding frenzy. From small starts, frenzies quickly develop a terrible momentum. For as long as it lasts, readers and viewers are buried in a blizzard of stories that compete to paint apocalyptic visions of horrors to come.
Politicians shamelessly join in.
Then, like a tap being turned off, it stops. Absolutely the finest example in my experience was the flesh-eating bug which transfixed the press in the summer of 1994. This was a strain of Streptococcus capable of killing those unlucky enough to be infected with it. There was nothing new about the organism or the symptoms it caused, which had been beautifully described in a surgical journal by a doctor working in Shanghai as long ago as 1919. Nor was there any real evidence of an epidemic, or even a significant increase in the number of cases.