Another flawed method of emphasizing a problem's impor¬tance is to focus on some narrowly deified population where the problem is relatively concentrated. Consider this claim from a scholarly article on teen suicide: "Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents...."13 It is difficult to know how to evaluate this claim, because it does not define its terms: What is an adolescent'? What are the other categories for cause of death?,. But a key feature of this statistic is that it concerns only adolescents. Adolescents have a much lower death rate than adults, primarily because few adolescents die from heart disease, cancer, strokes, and the other diseases that account for most deaths. Infants and adults-especially older adults-are far more likely to suffer fatal diseases than adolescents, and this shapes overall death rates.
In other words, because relatively few adolescents die each year, it doesn't take all that many deaths to account for a large share of adolescent deaths. (Similarly, in assessing warnings that AIDS accounts for a large share of deaths among males in their twenties, it is important to remember that relatively few males in that age group die from other causes.) Thus, an age group rarely beset by other causes of death is the perfect popula¬tion for emphasizing the importance ofsome lethal threa
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