Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
And I'm Ruth Alexander.
We're always pleased when the More or Less inbox pings with a question from a loyal listener, like Henry, who sent this to moreorless at bbc.co.uk.
But there's the option of a live liver transplant.
That's when part of a liver is taken from someone who's living, normally a close relative or friend.
And a live transplant means the operation can often be done more quickly, but it does carry its own risk.
That friend or relative, in Henry's case his brother, could die as a result of the procedure.
When we hear news reports of a child going missing, we often jump to the worst conclusions.
The CBS news channel WUSA recently launched a safety awareness campaign called Every 90 Seconds, which is based on the claim that a child goes missing every one and a half minutes in the US every 90 seconds.
It's a figure that's been widely quoted in the media over the past few years, and it sounds alarming because you might reasonably assume it refers to kidnappings.
But does it?
In that year, there were about 70 million under-18s in America as a whole, so that's one in 90 children reported missing in a single year.
And it may sound like a high number, but what exactly does it mean when we say a child is missing?
So the news channel says a child goes missing every 90 seconds, but Parents.com says it happens even more often than that, every 40 seconds.
You know, it all sounds very alarming, these statistics, but there are lots of reasons why a child may go missing.
They may have run away from home or failed to come home on time.
Incidences which are, of course, worrying, but very different to their being kidnapped by a stranger in the street.
So in other words, the majority of children reported missing weren't really missing at all.
So we wondered why these figures are still being widely quoted.
I mean, 13 years after the Justice Department report was published and actually the data in it is 16 years old.
Showing 301–320 of 4,250 · page 16 of 213
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