ADVICE ON risk communication during an epidemic. “A final error that underlies official fear of fear is the notion that when you make people more afraid of bird flu, you are making them more fearful people. That is flat-out not true. You are as fearful as you are. You get slowly more fearful as you get older. Remember your teenage years if you doubt this. But your fearfulness changes over the decades, not over the days and weeks and months. For the most part, we are who we are. In a crisis we become very temporarily more fearful — that’s the adjustment reaction — but we quickly settle into the New Normal.”