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RE: Nukes close, infant deaths go down - Tooth Fairy Project - NY Times

One of Sternglass' "studies" involved infant mortality in Washington State

following exposure to the plume from Chernobyl. He reported in a meeting on

the East Coast a few years later that infant mortality was significantly

higher in the state in the months following Chernobyl. I only found out

about it because a Seattle Times reporter was at the meeting and it became

front page news. There was a slight problem with his study. He used reported

infant deaths to reach his conclusions, not actual occurrences. When we (the

Washington State Department of Health) looked into the statistics, which

would have been available to him also, we found that most counties batch

their death certificates and sent them in only every few months. Most of the

actual infant mortalities he cited in his study actually occurred in the

months before the Chernobyl accident.

I was interviewed by several Seattle TV stations, was able to correct the

misconception, and actually was able to receive an apology from the reporter

for not getting the other side before she wrote the original story.

Unfortunately, the follow-up in the newspaper that corrected it was buried

back in the paper somewhere.








>I looked at an earlier version of this "research" by Joe Mangano, a protege



>of Ernest Sternglass. It was ideologically-driven data mining of the 

>shoddiest sort. Mangano (et al.?) chose "downwind" counties without any 

>regard for actual wind patterns, choosing some that were upwind and 

>ignoring downwind counties whose infant mortality data did not conform to 

>the "right" answer.

---

This type of research by Sternglass has been discussed in great detail in a 

book written by Bo Lindell (former head of the Swedish Radiation Protection 

Institute, SSI) and Sven Löfveberg (also formerly at SSI) in 1972 & 1975. 

The book is in Swedish with the title "Kärnkraften, människan och 

säkerheten" (approx. "Nuclear Power, Man and Safety"). The essential pages 

are 263-277.



The text explains how Sternglass choses associations of various kinds. As an



example - he had been asked at a meeting in Copenhagen in 1971  why child 

mortality was correlated with radioactivity releases from Indian Point to 

the Hudson River (which hardly can hurt children on land) rather than with 

the predominant wind direction. The answer Sternglass gave was that the wind



direction didn't give as nice correlation. There is more crazy stuff 

explained (in the book) which refers to Indian Point including how time 

windows were chosen according to a similar mathematical approach.



These are not my personal ideas - it stems directly from the book I refer 

to,



Bjorn Cedervall    bcradsafers@hotmail.com





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