Women's Health Fear Tactics

On Wednesday night after class, I was reading my November issue of Women's Health magazine and was excited to see that they had an article about HPV. This article discussed the correlation between oral cancers and HPV. The article started out by describing a healthy woman in her mid twenties who never smoked, exercised regularly and ate well, this women had persistant sore throats and colds and after visits to multiple doctors, she found out that she had HPV-16 related stage III oral cancer. The article did not discuss her demise but the article leads one to believe that the outcome was not good.
The article then discusses statistics such as "Between 1999-2007 rates of HPV related oropharyngeal cancer rose 28 percent" and "Those who've had six or moral oral sex partners increase their chances [of oral cancer] by a whopping 340 percent."
After I first read this article, I was pretty freaked out (especially because the article before this one was "Is your health on the line" an article about cell phones and cancer) because they used the description of a young person similar to the demographics of the reader and then related a story filled with statistics to make one believe that you or, anyone could be at risk.
I discussed this article with my roommate and after we were both convinced that our brains were fried (from keeping our cell phones by our heads when we sleep) and that the sore throats we once in a while get were due to HPV related oral cancer we decided to look up more information about HPV related throat cancer... though we found that the HPV article was mostly true, we did realize that some statics were written in a fashion to make the reader believe that they were at risk. Is this a bad thing? I don't necessarily think so but unfortunately, not all readers will investigate these matters on their own and will think that they are going to get things that they aren't at risk for. On the other hand, I bet that the demographics for women's health readers are health conscious women and because of this, maybe an article "scaring" readers isn't appropriate...