Re: Cancer Assessment Press Release

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 11:06 AM 1/30/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>This event could be construed as a Lose-Lose situation as suggested.  On
>the other hand, this could also be construed as an opportunity to
>demonstrate our collective confidence in the safety of our radiological
>controls.  The opportunity may lie in a widely announced public prediction
>of the outcome, in which case a very strong PR case could be made for the
>industry safety as a group should the predicition be verified.

I find this idea appealing, but I also see a trap. I have seen studies
where the overall data fail to show any increased incidence of cancer in
the exposed group, but the authors then micro-analyzed for various cancer
types without regard to population sizes. These tend to find at least one
variance on the positive side that gets pointed out as evidence of
radiation-induced cancer (i.e., a rare cancer that was expected to occur
0.7 times in the exposed group and 2 cases were found in the study). If the
HP community goes on record predicting the outcome of the study, great care
must be taken to include some sort of disclaimer about such analyses. And
if we include such a disclaimer, might the press ignore it, or reject the
disclaimed prediction altogether?

If there is more news value (i.e., ability to attach an audience) in
trashing the HP community for predicting the outcome and being wrong, I
think we should expect the study's details to be selected so as to do just
that.


---------
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu