November 18, 2002
Well Then, Make Mine a Double Happy chance (in this case Iain Murray) brought me to Number Watch ("Working to Combat Math Hysteria"), which I somehow managed to miss before. Serendipitously, I found the link a few minutes after raising an eyebrow over this BBC report on alcohol and breast-cancer risk. Number Watch summarizes the alchoholic haze:

It transpires that one drink per day increases the risk of breast cancer by 6% and, furthermore, every extra drink increases it by another 6%. A relative risk of 1.06 is ludicrous even by the standards of the most fervent of epidemiologists. The Trojan Number of women in the study was 150,000, but we can deduce from risk estimates given that the number with breast cancer would probably be under 1,000. By the time you have divided them up into categories of drunkenness, you are talking about a couple of hundred in each, so the 6% would appear to be based on about 12 women.

Let us make the fanciful assumption that this figure is correct. In order to achieve a relative risk remotely acceptable to real science (2.0), a woman would have to consume twelve drinks every day of her life. Unfortunately, she would probably succumb to brain damage and liver failure, which would tend to invalidate the experiment.

See Iain's comments on this study here and here.

Number Watch is also annoyed with moneylenders-by-mail "from the land of the Mighty Dollar, where they don't seem to appreciate that .uk means that one does not live there." Heavens, a puny consideration like that wouldn't stop a self-respecting American merchant. Once, when living in the Mariana Islands, I received an advertising brochure, correctly addressed to my home in Sinajana, Guam, from a Denver area Incredible Universe. The sale, it told me, would be "well worth the drive."


Posted by Moira Breen at November 18, 2002 06:26 PM
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