Even the most cursory glance at the mainstream media suggests that the modern world is filled with potential dangers, so much so it’s hard to say which one you should be worrying about the most. Is the food we eat killing us? Is our weather too cold, or too hot? Are we going to be under attack from giant snakes, rats, or jellyfish? Or are terrorists the biggest threat? Or the return of the plague? Or maybe screens are slowly corrupting us all? Or mobile phones? There are many other possibilities.

However, recent findings suggest that true answer may be more insidious; the biggest threat to humanity today could be scaremongering.

A recently published study by the Department of Impending Apocalypse Studies at Doomsday University, Milton Keynes, has produced alarming results suggesting that scaremongering could threaten all life on Earth, as well as any microbes on Mars or Europa.

Professor Mortis, head of the study, claimed to be as surprised by the results as anyone.

“I wanted to find out what the biggest threat to mankind was, and I assumed it would be something predictable like asteroids or wasps, but all our data points towards scaremongering as the thing that’s going to kill us all. Probably quite painfully, as well. And slowly”.

Professor Mortis, known simply as “Mort” to those who work with him, expects the scientific community to resist his findings, but insists that they are accurate.

“Others in the field will no doubt accuse me of exaggerating the dangers, overstating the threat, emphasising the negative outcomes or … whatever else you’d call that, of scaremongering. But the data speaks for itself.”

In order to gather the data, Professor Mortis sent several teams of his postdocs and PhD students (whom he affectionately refers to as “Les Petits Morts”) out into the general population to many areas representing different levels of affluence, ethnicity, economic make-up etc, to gather information on what people felt the biggest threat facing society was.

“We got a very wide range of answers, such as vaccines, the illuminati and video games, but after some intense factor analysis, it was quite clear that the main common element of all of these was scaremongering.”

Scaremongering has been known to have direct effects on people’s health. For example, persistent scaremongering can induce high states of anxiety and acute stress, which can have detrimental physical effects, let alone the psychological impact, all of which impairs general functioning and health. But Professor Mortis argues that the more lethal effects of scaremongering are more indirect.

“The impacts on health of scaremongering are one thing, but it influences behaviour in other ways that are even more devastating. The drop in vaccination levels, the Iraq war and its consequences, discrediting health services, the demonising of minorities leading to increased social tensions and prejudice; all of these and more involve scaremongering to a very real degree, and all can prove very fatal to many, many people.”

The problem is even worse than that, Professor Mortis gloomily points out, as scaremongering is very diverse and difficult to deal with.

“Not only does it have all these negative consequences, scaremongering is a master of misdirection, so can hamper any attempt to deal with said negative consequences. Climate change, antibiotic resistance; these are very real threats which need to be dealt with ASAP, but people who don’t want to believe this just dismiss them as scaremongering, when they are anything but! Scaremongering is so damn devious, and you can’t even punch it in its smug evil face because it doesn’t have one, what with being an abstract concept and all.”

In fact, scaremongering is so vague and poorly understood as a scientific entity, Professor Mortis has had to devise his own system for recording it. Using Professor Mortis’s system, scaremongering is measured in units known as “Greenfields”, after a particularly common scientific source.

“Say your partner sees a small spider in the bathtub and then tells you it was the size of a dinner plate, that’s just 4 or 5 milliGreenfields of scaremongering. But politicians claiming that a referendum could lead to terrorist attacks? That’s several hundred Greenfields, there.”

Politics and media organisations with political agendas are a particularly rich source of scaremongering, with US election campaigns and the Daily Express in particular often having an output measured in megaGreenfields.

“Keeping people scared is an effective way of controlling them, so it’s no wonder politicians and their media friends are neck-deep in scaremongering” Professor Mortis adds.

There are, as predicted, other scientific experts who disagree with Professor Mortis’s claims, citing the fact that many people enjoy being scared, and the fact that many news stories, especially regarding health and medicine, often emphasise the positives and downplay the negatives, which many could argue as actually being more harmful when it comes to making informed choices. They also say that scaremongering may be a consequence rather than a cause of much of what threatens humans in the modern era.

However, Professor Mortis is dismissive of such views.

“My data speaks for itself, you won’t find any flaws in my research and analysis. I’m known for it. You start looking for many different interpretations and you don’t know where you’ll end up. Me, I’m all about the rigour. My colleagues say I’m too rigid, too stiff, that “you’re all about the rigour, Mortis”, but I stand by my work.

"The bottom line is, the dangers of scaremongering cannot be overstated.”

The earliest recorded example of scaremongering dates from around 40,000 years ago and is found in the Cave of El Castillo. Among the famous paintings are some of predators that, experts say, are clearly much bigger than they would have been in the wild.

"Some palaeolithic bloke was probably trying to put the wind up his tribe mates. Cynical sod" said an archaeologist.

Professor Mortis was unavailable for comment on this, as he had sealed himself in an underground bunker with 400 cans of beans and a shotgun.

Dean Burnett usually tries to downplay the dangers of everything, thus accelerating mankind’s inevitable demise, via Twitter @garwboy