Are we safe enough?

Death by warning!

That's my problem with modern car manuals (in the U.S.), so many warnings that it has become impossible to skim through it to find how to actually operate things.

The same here with appliances, several pages of pretty obvious "it is dangerous to..." warnings before you come to "how to operate", usually a fraction of the health and safety warnings.

I'd always assumed that all of this grew out of the tendency in the U.S. to sue and companies trying to protect themselves. Did we export our lawsuit culture, or has it just grown everywhere?

When I was in Berlin, we had the right to use the PX (far superior in every respect to our NAAFI) After seeing on a bleach bottle a Federal warning about not taking internally, I suggested to a sales assistant that it was a "statement of the bleedin' obvious" (Monty Python). She told me that companies did it to firmly put the fault for misuse on the individual and therefore avoid a law suit. I'm not sure if it was imported from you or just arose, but litigation is big business here now, especially after a certain prime minister, himself and his wife lawyers, introduced legislation allowing open advertising - "no win, no fee". You now have the ludicrous situation where hospitals controversially generate revenue by putting up posters from law firms offering legal assistance to victims of medical malpractice. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas!

That (hospitals advertising malpractice firms) is more perverse than our habits.

I worked and taught for many years as a health sociologist and it seemed particularly perverse how problematic diagnoses that started in the U.S. took hold in Europe. For example, the conversion of relatively common variations in behavior by children became overly diagnosed as medical syndromes in the U.S. and that over-diagnosis spread into Europe. The last I looked, though, Europe was still much less likely to diagnoses such syndromes than were Americans. Attention deficit disorder is an example of such. Clearly there are children (and adults) who are 'wired' differently and it helps to have a label to help understand their differences, but it unfortunately became popular to have your child diagnosed as such even if they had no signs of it, just so that they could get special dispensation in the classroom.

You have hit a nail right on the head. Such "syndromes" are very prevalent here now, part of the "no one is to blame for anything mentality" and often an excuse for bad parenting. And of course, people then become eligible, following such diagnoses, for state handouts for these, often, perceived disabilities.