Ravenwood - 02/16/05 06:15 AM
The U.N. is going to start going after alcohol as aggressively as they have gone after tobacco, writes Steve Milloy for Fox News. The U.N. claims that 4% of disease is caused by alcohol, while 4.1% is caused by tobacco, and 4.4% high blood pressure. They claim that alcohol can cause more than 60 different medical conditions and ought to be severly restricted. But the devil is in the details.
To debunk the statistical myth, Milloy lets a 2002 U.N. report speak for itself.
"Causes [of disease] can add to more than 100 percent. If the scenarios were equally common, 66.6 percent of throat cancer would be attributable to smoking, 33.3 percent to alcohol, 100 percent to genetic causes, and 100 percent to unknown environmental causes, making a total of 300 percent. Causes can, and ideally should, total more than 100 percent; this is an inevitable result of different causes working together to produce the disease, and reflects the extent of our knowledge of disease causation."Did you catch that? By quitting drinking you might lower your chance of getting throat cancer from 300% to 267%. This is what happens when you use simple proportionality to conclude a causal relationship.
Of course all these statistics will be dutifully regurgitated by the usual suspects of pleasure police and nanny-state liberals who want to take away cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and SUVs. Of course that's usually the whole reason these studies are conducted in the first place.
I'll give up my beer when you pry it from my cold drunken hands.
Category: Pleasure Police
Comments (5) top link me
That's more or less the grammar of ``cause'' though. Lots of things can be the cause of something, at once or separately, depending on what you want to say about it.
The nonsense comes in the statistical result, which is implying a single cause (contrary to the usual use, which chooses to focus on one, and this is understood). They play on the implication that they're then at pains to sort of debunk because it's then nonsense.
Birth is the cause of 100% of deaths, so there'd be quite a savings there too.
You can't take ordinary language into scientific language without screwing up somehow.
Other handy nonscientific terms : busybody, handwringer, hysteric, tight-assed, chickenshit. Nobody does statistics on these though.
Wonder if beverage makers will have to pass a "global test" now before releasing a new line of alcoholic drinks.
Posted by: Dan Newbanks at February 16, 2005 11:49 AMBirth? Small potatoes! Breathing is the number one cause of death worldwide. Not a single person has not eventually succumbed after taking that first addictive breath. The air is filled with countless pollutants and toxins like carbon dioxide, yet people still insist on drawing breath after dangerous breath. And what is the last thing these hopeless addicts do? Try to work in those last few precious breaths. We need to impose an immediate ban of this dangerous activity, for the general health and welfare of the nation.
Posted by: Pasty at February 16, 2005 12:48 PMMaybe restricting cigarettes and liquor is merely an effort to limit the number of rapes committed by UN peacekeeper/sexual predators.
Posted by: Michael at February 16, 2005 1:05 PM"I'll give up my beer when you pry it from my cold drunken hands."
Does that mean you've been drinking an Assault Beer?
Posted by: Robert Garrard at February 18, 2005 7:26 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
