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Kai,
No,
you are not looking at tens of millions of excess cancers. What you are
looking at is a map of reported cancer cases normalized to a certain population
value. You are reading too much into the maps, and need review the
origianal report before making any startling statements. I believe that
some of the values are rounded, some are estimates, etc. I think you are
putting too much faith into the accuracy of the values.
Second, there are a lot of confounding factors that are
not even evident in the data. For example, a lot of people move to Arizona
when they retire, but do not stay there the whole year. They are called
snowbirds. In the summer they travel up north to die. (My daughter
lives in Phoenix, so she has an idea of what is going on.)
I
think you have to accept the fact that there is more here than just colors and
numbers.
-- John
John P. Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail: jenday1@msn.com
The comments presented are mine and do not
reflect the opinion of my employer or spouse.
------------------------------------
Ruth,
If migration of retirees is responsible for
excess cancer mortality, then a map of retiree migration should match the
cancer map. I kind of doubt that it will. Lots of old people move to Arizona,
but cancer incidence seems low throughout the sate.
You think the reason the cancer map looks like it
does is because of migration, John thinks its because of population density,
someone else thinks its because of diet or a combination of factors. All I'm
saying is that it is worthwhile to figure out what it is. We are looking at
tens of millions of excess cancers here.
We are at least 3 orders of magnitude larger than
what would be expected from statistical fluctuations. Therefore, something
causes the map to look like it does. It should be possible to map a causal
factor, or a mathematical function of factors, to reproduce the features of
the map. Otherwise, we have to admit to ourselves that we are pretty
clueless.
Regards,
Kai
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 02, 2003 9:58
AM
Subject: Re: Apparent anti-correlations
between geographic radiation and cancer are no...
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
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