Edith Gbur and Cancer Clusters

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@pnl.gov>]

Re Edith Gbur:  In this Internet day and age it's easy enough to discover who
Edith Gbur is; simply go to an Internet search engine and search on "Edith
Gbur".

Re cancer clusters:  Several years ago I wrote a small Basic language program
that randomly placed "disease cases" on an 24 by 80 spatial grid (remember
MS-DOS?).  The program tallied the number of times each of the 1920 cells was
"hit" and at the end printed out those numbers on the screen for all 1920 screen
locations.  I would be happy to send anyone interested the source code, although
if you don't have access to an MSDOS box in Windows and some version of Basic,
you would have to modify it to get it to work.

The upshot is that Clusters Happen.  In fact, an even distribution of disease
cases without any clusters would be an outcome of extraordinarily small
probability.

Somewhere among my souvenirs is a paper from the New Scientist several years ago
that makes the same point.  I rummaged around on my hard disk for a citation,
without success.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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