by whologwhy
Fukushima Radiation and Infant Mortality in the NW? No way.
[Via Cliff Mass Weather Blog]
Irresponsible environmental scarsters are back.During the past few days a number of you have emailed me about several media stories and web reports about radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant causing a 35% increase in infant mortality here in the Pacific Northwest.The majority of the mainstream media did not go with this story, but a few did, like our local KCPQ (see story here) and other outlets like examiner.com and the well-known Aljazeera.This was all based on a report by Physician Janette Sherman, and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano that was published online by the “Progressive Radio Network” and by the web site “Counterpunch.” In this report they noted that for the 4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 there were 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week) but for the 10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 there were 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week). They note that “this amounts to an increase of 35 per cent (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3 per cent ) and is statistically significant.”Folks, this is complete and utter nonsense and shows the downside of the web—crazy stuff gets sent around and news-hungry and sloppy media pick it up and give it credibility.First, the whole premise is silly. That the extraordinarily small amounts of radiation reaching our shores from Fukushima are killing infants through some mysterious mechanism. But it is worst than that…just plain bad statistics!Here is the their data for the four weeks before and the ten weeks after, shown in black and orange, respectively (credit to this site for the graphs)
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There is a reason they chose the 4 weeks before the disaster – it gave them the results they wanted. If they had gone back 11 weeks before, they would have had an average infant mortality rate GREATER than seen since the disaster.
Yes, somehow the radiation killed all those infants 11 weeks before the meltdown.
One has to be aware of cherrypicking when one reads any article. And one of the most common ways is to limit the time period examined.
That was one of the first things that stuck out for me – why did they only look at the 4 weeks before yet at 10 weeks after? Why not do 10 weeks each? Or compare relative times in the year – that is March 2010 vs March 2011 – as infant mortality might also change during the year.
This is the same sort of things climate denialists use all the time. Here we see a more liberal group trying the same thing.
A Man With A Ph.D. 