Cot death confusion

So another day and another cryptic health story in the press.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/10October/Pages/Cotdeathriskandfanuse.aspx

So the news is that having a fan on when a baby sleeps could dramatically cut the risk of cot death. Great, all well and good. But then you read/watched/listened on to discover that: there was a 94% reduction of cot death with a fan in rooms over 21°C, and little or no difference in deaths with a fan in rooms under 21°C. Eh??? So are they are saying if you keep the room cool to limit the risk of cot death? If so why have they made it so statistical? Why does the story have to be so complicated? People could interpret this story with all these statistics and arguments in different ways, therefore absorbing the wrong information.
For those of you who are parents of young children out there, I can imagine when first hearing this story it sounded like a simple way of hopefully keeping your children safe, but then you learn the full story and it has all these 'ifs', 'buts' and 'howevers', it would distress you even more to think you may be doing the wrong thing for your child than if you had just never heard this story at all.
So if a health study doesn't conclusively prove anything at all is it really news? It seems to me stories like this create this hypochondriac culture. If people took all the health stories in the news into account, which some protective mums do especially well, there would be so many contradictions that it would be impossible to know what to believe. For example, I have heard many contradictory stories about having one or two glasses of wine a day. And, lo-and-behold, if you type 'one glass of wine a day' into a search engine, you get a story like this, and a story like this, amongst others.
So are health stories really for our own good? Or to scare and bamboozle us?