UT Study Finds Elevated Cancer Rates Near Flower Mound, TX, Contradicting State Study

[hatrack]

EDIT

The state study concluded that the number of Flower Mound cases was within the statistically normal range, except for breast cancer cases, which were slightly higher than expected. The reanalysis of the Flower Mound data was conducted by Dr. Maria Morandi, a former research professor from the Center for Environmental Health Services at the University of Montana, said Rawlins, who has a law degree and is not a scientist or statistician.

“The reanalysis found, with 95 percent certainty, that rates of childhood leukemia and childhood non-Hodgkins lymphoma in Flower Mound are significantly higher than expected,” she said. “There is only a 1 in 20 chance that the difference is random.”

She said state health officials dismissed further analysis because they were not able to confirm, with 99 percent certainty, that cancer rates were elevated in Flower Mound. “We still have much to learn about the effects of toxic chemicals on human health. Yet we don’t learn anything when we abort a study because we are not 99 percent sure there is a problem. That is what happened in Flower Mound,” she said.

Although the state attributed the breast cancer increase to population growth, Rawlins said the town’s population increased 41 percent between 1998 and 2008, “but the breast cancer rates more than tripled during this period.”

EDIT

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/lewisville-flower-mound/headlines/20140331-new-study-finds-elevated-cancer-rate-in-flower-mound.ece

[tech3149]

1. Welcome to another sacrifice zone!

There was a study back in 2011, I think, that showed cancer clusters around mountaintop removal sites. Any time there's a profit to be made from extracting resources, the population can FOAD (f$%k off and die).
Appalachia has felt the effects for more than a hundred years. Texas still hasn't connected the dots. North Dakota will feel the pain pretty soon. I'm in W PA and people are starting to feel the pain from the fracking madness.

[phantom power]

2. two comments

1) Nobody will give a shit, because this has nothing to do with either nuclear power or radiation. Neither Germany, Japan, nor anybody else is going to immediately turn off 50 gigawatts of gas power due to cancer cases from human energy industries that don't involve radiation.

2) As far as wanting better than 95% confidence intervals, I have to back them up to a certain degree. Consider: If you publish results at 95% confidence, it means that on average, over time, 5 out of every 100 such publications are going to be wrong. That's not trivial, especially when such publications are going to be used to inform public policy.