(Vague Spoilers for some of you[?], and somewhat tangential.)
It is interesting to look at how the different characters in White Noise react to their own preoccupation with death. (“Death has always been a preoccupation of man” ? Anyways… ) Heinrich’s clinical, detached perspective and fascination with atrocities is offensive to us, in light of Jack’s fate. But Jack himself had a similarly detached perspective earlier in the novel, before the exposure. So Heinrich static character acts as a foil to Jack’s existential pondering, and later Babette’s.
And then the Dylar is introduced. Obviously, the drug starts off as an object of foreboding, becoming a tiny counterpart to the Nyodene D threat. The cloud is an overwhelming phenomenon, opaque and oppressive, confronting the community as a whole with their fears (although noticeably not forging any real sense of community in the process, either overall or within the family). The Dylar, in contrast, is insidious, encapsulating (ambivalent on that pun) the paranoia / hypochondria of the modern consumer. Both, however, render their effects in unseen, uncertain ways. Unnatural death for people in developed countries is no longer an external issue in the way that we think of it as spectacle in developing countries (fires, tsunamis, etc.). Instead it is a delayed, lifelong process – anxieties about plastic leaching into drinking water, unexplainable, gradual neurological malfunctions, and so on. It seems that, in general, the paralyzing fear of, or obsession with, non-immediate health problems is a luxury of the developed world. It is difficult, however, to determine the main cause of these anxieties. Information saturation (“white noise”) seems to be the largest component, but we are also living in a society where medications and (really) health problems are marketed directly to the consumer. “Instant gratification” culture does not engender a psychological acceptance of the possibility of ongoing, debilitating health problems.