Re: Apparent anti-correlations between geographic radiation and cancer are no...

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/2/03 8:36:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, eic@shaw.ca writes:


> The map http://www.dceg.cancer.gov/cgi-bin/atlas/mapview2?direct=acccwm70 doesn't seem to support that conclusion. It may also be that "cancer clusters" are usually considered a few incidences of very rare forms of cancer. I think the biggest leukemia cluster has about a dozen or two cases. These "clusters" would not show up on a cancer map that deals with millions of cases. I don't know what the New Yorker article meant by clusters. (Us healthy prairie folk only read fishing magazines, if we read at all.)
>
>   



The map is a map of cancer mortality, not incidence.  While it is age-adjusted, it does not provide the fraction of deaths that are cancer deaths, and generally seems to follow both population and total mortality (e.g., Las Vegas, NV has a growing population of retirees, so the number of people who die there increases, and thus, as anticipated, cancer mortality would increase).  I don't think one can draw any conclusion about the cause of cancer from such a map.


Ruth



Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com