The New York Times has published an excellent (well, I thought so) article called Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?. What's particularly good about it is the clear but thorough way that it explains the problems of looking for causes of rare diseases, and describes the methods used for dealing with uncertainty in this challenging context.
Statistical significance testing is one of the commonest formal ways of handling some kinds of uncertainty, but arguably it's one of the most misunderstood. We've posted a new article about statistical significance, in the context of some very controversial psychological experiments about extra-sensory perception (ESP).
The recent study on alcohol and cancer published in the British Medical Journal is a fine piece of epidemiology and attracted a lot of coverage of the estimate that 10% of male cancers and 3% of female cancers could be attributed to alcohol. But while it is useful as a description of what happens in populations, as usual when translated to an individual it stops looking so impressive.
Yesterday’s announcement that the Fukushima accident was now upgraded to a Level 7 was greeted with some consternation, since this is not only the same level as Chernobyl but as high as the scale can go – there is no Level 8. But is this scale really fit for its purpose?
Statistical significance testing is a pretty tricky concept. We're planning to post an article on it soon, but until we get round to it, here's a link to something excellent on the topic from the xkcd Web comic. They're illustrating exactly what people misunderstand. Maybe we needn't bother with the article after all...
Screening for disease was in the news again in the UK last week. According to the BBC, a 20-year Swedish study of screening for prostate cancer showed that screening brought no benefit. (The actual study report didn't put it quite so baldly, but effectively did conclude there was no benefit.) This came just a couple of days after the Alzheimer's Disease Society asked that the NHS should offer checks for dementia to everyone (in the UK) when they reach the age of 75. Both these news items reported contrasting views on whether these screening checks are in fact advisable.
Most school textbooks contain messages about health. But there's no known evidence for about a quarter of the messages. At least, that's the position in Granada, Spain, according to a report in BMC Public Health.
BMC Public Health is one of those online, open access journals that are becoming more and more prominent in academic publishing. A couple of recent articles throw rather different lights on the communication of health messages to the public. One is pretty positive about how Australian television reported the 2009 swine flu epidemic. The other reports an analysis of school books in Spain, and I'll return to that in another blog entry.
Your medical chart: it's hard to access, impossible to read -- and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At TEDMED, Thomas Goetz looks at medical data, making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it.
Google seems to be doing pretty well everything these days. Their UK operation has just published the first issue of a new magazine, Think Quarterly, and it's all about data. It looks very pleasant, particularly if you read the version that emulates a print magazine. And there's some interesting content, including interviews with Hans Rosling and with Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist who famously said in 2009 that "the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians." But, strangely, the whole magazine says nothing explicit about uncertainty.
Your medical chart: it's hard to access, impossible to read -- and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At 
