Report Without Proof Implies Pollution Responsible for Cancer
April 12, 2011
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
The environmental group, Goldman Environmental Prize has recently highlighted their 2011 winners. The North American winner, Hilton Kelley did an admirable job cleaning up pollution in his home town of Port Arthur Texas, but as usual the press can’t seem to leave a good story alone and just let it be good.
Instead, they used bad math, with no evidence & no context, to transform Mr. Kelley’s pollution cleanup efforts with the “C” word… as posted @ Phsyic’s Today (here):
…his hometown… was troubled by the pollution—the city and surrounding county had one of the highest levels of air pollution in the US, and residents suffered from cancer rates that were 23% higher than the state average, according to the Texas Cancer Registry.
The problem is this statement seems to imply that this particular “pollution” led to higher cancer rates, yet no evidence is presented.
Not only is no evidence presented, but additionally statistics teaches us that in any broad distribution, pockets within that distribution will contain statistical anomalies.
As a thought experiment – try this analogous (numbers based upon TX population versus Port Arthur), yet meaningless statement:
“when testing the 50/50 proposition of coin flips, out of 24 million total flips, in a group of 55K of those flips, there as a 23% higher incidence rate of ‘heads’ than in the total.”
Categories: Science
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Tags: Science
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