Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article , dpb wrote:

Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article , dpb wrote:

It is, however, a statistical correlation at best and my guess is that
except for the near downstream track it will be impossible to detect any
increase owing specifically to Chernobyl.

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From a purely epidemiological standpoint, it really shouldn't be all
that difficult to find clusters of excess cancers, and there are forms
of cancer that are more highly correlated with exposure to nuclear
materials. It would be correlational, but then much of public health
is.
That assumes there _are_ such clusters...the dispersion was so wide,
it's highly unlikely to be concentrated enough to show up imo.

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That should be even easier, then. Any related cancers suddenly
spike after Chernobyl world wide? Any upswings over time, since
radiation-induced cancers are very dose dependent. There either was an
important change in cancers after Chernobyl or there wasn't. If there
are no clusters and no spike, then it would be hard to argue (at least
from an epi standpoint) that Chernobyl had any impact.

Precisely, and imo, if any studies had shown even a hint, haller and his
ilk would be on them like a hen on a June bug, even if they weren't
statstically significant but only showed a point estimate possibility.
Of course, the "suddenly" is a problem w/ low-dosage events and that
makes the correlation of causation even more tenuous.

That they're not implies to me w/o even looking that all work (of which
I'm sure there's a lot because plans were in effect to begin such
follow-on studies while I was still in Oak Ridge participating in
engineering solutions studies/analyses for the site within the year
after the incident).



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