There's a point I keep beating into people whenever someone utters the word "cancer" within my earshot. Actually, two related points:

- Just ignore the news; if Commonly Used Thing X was Actually Dangerous, you'd see people around you dying from cancer clearly tied to it.

- If you really have to go into it, demand to know actual values - not that something "causes cancer", but how it adjusts the probability, and then factor in the base probability. Something increasing cancer risk 100x may sound dangerous until you realize we're talking about increase from 0.00005% to 0.0005%, at which point you can, once again, just completely ignore it.