[ RadSafe ] Re: uranium trioxide gas exposure patterns (was:...RE:Gardner Sellafield cluster)

[John Jacobus]

I read your comments with interest.  Could one make
the conclusion that if the numbers are small, that one
could not conclude there is a proof that of a
beneficial radiation effect in this and other cases? 
If not, why not?



--- Ivor Surveyor <isurveyor at vianet.net.au> wrote:
> 
> >James Salsman  quoted from a paper by  P.
> Gustavsson, M. Talbäck, A. 
> >Lundin, B. Lagercrantz,
> >P.-E. Gyllestad, and L. Fornell in "Incidence of
> cancer among
> . . .

> I would like to make one other point,  The
> assignment of a causal 
> relationship in medicine is very difficult, and in
> this process correlation 
> is only one of many factors to be decided. Robert
> Koch about 120 years ago 
> addressed this problem.  As did Austin Bradford Hill
> in a well known 
> address to the Royal society of Medicine in 1965.
> Recently Phillips and 
> Goodman (Epidemiol Perspectives and Innovations
> 2004;1:1-11)  make the 
> point that the Bradford Hill criterion is not " a
> cook book " recipe for 
> causation.  Scientific judgment is required.  I
> suggest that the balance of 
> judgement is against a causal role for DU in human
> disease.
> 
> Ivor Surveyor [ isurveyor at vianet.net.au ] 
> 
> 

+++++++++++++++++++
"Embarrassed, obscure and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure and feeble thought."
Hugh Blair, 1783

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


		
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