I think Bob made an excellent response here. I'll just add my two cents in
here and there.
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: Europe, the US, and Environmentalism
> In a message dated 7/3/01 7:15:23 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> <<
> You'll have to come up with some very convincing evidence, though. Let's
> say a report claims that in a town with a nuclear power plant nearby, the
> cancer rate is three times as high as the national average, and the power
> plant is blamed for it. You'll have a hard time convincing me that the
> higher rate is just a coincidence, and not related to the presence of
that
> nuclear power plant. >>
>
> The rates will not be nearly that high. If they are, then something else
is
> going on.
Let me give an example of this. There was a claim that radiation workers at
Oak Ridge got a particular type of cancer at twice the national rate. This
was cited as proof that the radiation limits were far too low. I was a bit
taken aback by that, until I researched the number of cancers. IIRC, it was
8, when 4 were expected. Well, there is about a 5% chance of that happening
for a given cancer. If you consider that they could have checked more than
30 different types of cancer until they saw one that was twice average, you
will see that this type of doubling is seen for any group of people that you
can find.
> Only using sound statistical methods can the cancers be linked to power
> plants (in the way that smoking was linked to lung cancer). Smoking is a
good
> example of how science works and why the notion that large companies or
> industries can suppress scientific knowledge is wrong. No industry tried
> harder to suppress knowledge of the harm of its products than the tobacco
> industry. And yet they did not succeed. The harmful effects of smoking
have
> evaluated and identified for about 50 years, despite enormous political
and
> economic pressure from the extremely wealthy tobacco industry.
That is an excellent point. The wonderful thing about science is that
reality has this tendency to keep on interfering with very reasonable
sounding theories. This goes on until people give up and accept the
empirical.
>
> Take as an example the high tension line causes cancer story. Most of this
> stuff was anectodal to begin with. One study, that came out of Duke did
> suggest an increased incidence but this was shown to be statistically
flawed.
> And yet this piece of nonsense refused to die.
One interesting story about that is the analysis that the API (American
Physical Institute) was asked to do on the subject. (Since it involved
biology and physics, physicists were among the people working on the
problem). They demonstrated how one could prove that power lines prevented
cancer by the same techniques used to prove that the caused it. It has to
do with looking through hundreds of different cancers until a high rate
is found that has less than a chance in 100 of being the result of random
statistics.
> >From the outlet there could have been no physical means for high tension
lines
> to have caused the diseases that were being reported.
>
Right. The electromagnetic fields from the power lines were much lower than
natural fields in the cell. And, since E&M is classical physics, low levels
have no measurable effects. Zimmy, I think this is an example of physicists
and biologists/physicians doing a fine job working together. :-)
Dan M.
