Highly recommended reading from Dariusz Leszczynski’s blog
From the blog “between a Rock and A Hard Place:
It”™s the epidemiology, stupid!
Link: http://betweenrockandhardplace.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/Ӣits-the-epidemiology-stupid/
Posted on November 26, 2011
Excerpt:
The known, to many, phrase “It”™s the economy, stupid!”¯ was brought into the politics by James Carville, adviser to the Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign. Since then this phrase has entered the main stream media and is used in different contexts, by replacing the word “economy”¯ with some other term. This phrase points out to something so obvious that we not always remember of it.
Here, I have replaced the word “economy”¯ with the word “epidemiology”¯ to talk about the obvious reason for causing confusion among the mobile phone users and decision makers about the potential risk of mobile phone radiation-induced brain cancer. In fact, the two largest epidemiology studies are not only non-informative but they both are misleading and one of them includes such a grave error that this study should never pass through peer review of reviewers and editors and should never been published in its current form.
To lay readers, just as a brief reminder: epidemiology is the science that examines what is happening in human population when exposed to agents that might, or might not, affect the health. So, epidemiology attempts to determine what the probability is, and I stress the word “probability”¯, that the examined agent can, or cannot, cause harm to human health. What the lay readers (including journalists) do not always seem to remember, are the limitations of epidemiological method.
For the full article go to: http://betweenrockandhardplace.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/Ӣits-the-epidemiology-stupid/
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