Reply #40: Do you understand how statistical analysis works? [View All]

You are agreeing with the structure of research that is specifically used in an attempt to under-report the consequences of environmental impact by creating a far too strict model for determining cause and effect. For example, using the type of criteria you are claiming is the only acceptable method of investigation resulted in huge undercounts of civilian fatalities associated with the Iraq invasion.

The authors of the Lancet study used a well designed method of sampling and well understood methods of statistical analysis to determine that civil casualties in that war exceeded 900,000 IIRC instead of the 10K or so that morgue body counts concluded.

Why do you trust studies that are controlled by people with vested interests in the outcome instead of paying attention to equally qualified researchers with no vested interests?

"Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former. Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia."