back to article The return of Killer Chlorine

After many mind-sapping years of trawling through the morass of health scare stories, I formulated a number of laws, one of which was the Law of Beneficial Developments: The intensity of the scaremongering attack on any new development is proportional to the level of benefit that it endows. Unbelievably, the Chlorine Scare has …

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  1. Avalanche

    @Helmets

    I live in the Netherlands, and as people know: lots of people riding bikes here and almost no one wears a helmet. As it is, most accidents involving cyclists are usually side impact from a car, and the helmet would not have helped. On the other hand, here we have a lot cycling paths (either free-laying or a reserved strip on the main road), which probably makes it a whole lot safer then in countries without a developed cycling-culture.

    When I was in school I had to ride 30 km by bike daily (15km to school, and 15km back) and had some 'accidents' (linking of handlebars with the friend next to you, slippery roads, racing cyclists who don't yield). In my experience, you usually are able to break your fall and as a result are more likely to hurt your hands, arms or knees (or maybe your balls) then your head.

    In my opinion the benefits of a bicycle helmet is grossly overrated (as almost all other Dutch seem to think), I only think they can have some benefit for:

    1) kids: inexperience and small posture will make it easier for them to hit their head, and the helmet will probably not save more lives, but prevent them from crying (negative effect in the Netherlands: more likely to be bullied by other kids without helmets)

    2) racing cyclists: racing in a large group of cyclists makes it more likely that you cannot anticipate and break your fall, or that someone in behind you drives over you

  2. Tom

    It's safest to not get vaccinated, as long as every one else is.

    "And did you know that most children who get complications or die from whooping cough are too young to have been vaccinated"

    And where did they get whooping cough from? The people who didn't get vaccinated.

  3. El Draque

    Cycle safely

    Ref. Cycle helmets.

    There was a scientific study, I believe the researcher was based at Bath. He fitted a proximity sensor to his bicyle on his regular trip to work. He rode the bicycle with and without the helmet.

    The cars came closer to him when he wore a helmet.

    He was hit twice during the test, both times when wearing said helmet.

    But: it doesn't mean it's better not to wear one. The risk of an incident may be slightly higher, but the consequences if you land on your head are many times more serious.

  4. JT2008
    Dead Vulture

    Hmmm ...good question, but -

    Christine Houghton said: "Since its creation, chlorine has been a chemical catastrophe. It is either chlorine or us."

    Chlorine. We're all going to die sometime ...

    PS: Even the radioactive isotope version will outlive humanity by a long stretch. Its half-life is 301,000 (± 4,000 years).

  5. James Pickett

    @Tom

    "And where did they get whooping cough from? The people who didn't get vaccinated"

    Or the people who did. My partner has post-polio syndrome, despite never having officially had the disease. Indeed, virtually all cases of polio in the Western world are caused by the vaccine, as it doesn't exist in the wild.

    Curiously, deaths and complications from whooping cough in very young babies increased a while after vaccinations began. This was a bit of a mystery until it became apparent that mothers who had been vaccinated were unable to transfer their immunity (not being the same as that obtained from the actual disease) through breast-feeding. The same is true of measles, so none of this is quite as simple as it looks.

    Also, look up shaken baby syndrome...

  6. MooToTheMax

    Bicycle helments

    I used to cycle 25 miles each day, until I was given a free frlying lesson over an Audi TT.

    Anyway, in ten years of cycling hard, I've fallen off the bike twice, and had the one nasty accident mentioned above, and you know what? Despite not wearing a helmet now, I'd much rather that if my head was going to scrape along the ground, I would like it to be covered.

    Sure, I'm convinced that not wearing a helmet makes me a safer cyclist, but as a driver I don't notice if a cyclist is wearing a helmet or not; I go out of my way to pass considerately regardless.

    So, in short: helmet makes scrapes less painful.

  7. yeah, right.

    bad science

    I haven't seen so much bad science (on all sides of the argument) since the "Intentional Design" people last tried to argue that their hypothesis is actually a theory.

  8. Markus Bleicher
    Flame

    Fighting junk science with junk journalism

    Reading the as "chlorination was stopped in Peru" referenced article (published by

    the organisation of the US chemical industry), I've now read two articles from

    people claiming to provide some scientific insight, but in fact just tell stories. "From a superior vantage point." And not even they are reported correcty.

    To summarize "I was surprised to learn that some local PAHO officials were encountering pockets of resistance to chlorination from a number of health officials, both in Peru and in other countries" as "chlorination was stopped in Peru"

    without any figures how widespread its adoptions was before and after the

    cholera outbreak is probably just the ususal way, Greenpeace and other people

    looking for attention do it.

    To criticize the anti-industrial attitude of most of the ecological movement and put

    the suffering of human beings at the center of the debate is absolutely reasonable,

    but this kind of industry-hugging unwillingness to really climb on the " superior vantage point" is an insult to reason, even this is not the main point of the article.

    I see: The Register bites the hands feeding IT, not chemistry.

    If you want to read about science, read Science.

  9. CTG
    Unhappy

    In defence of 0.05

    I've had several scornful reactions from mathematicians when I have referred to 0.05 as the level of statistical significance commonly used in biology. "What about the law of large numbers?" they cry.

    Well, yes, when you are looking at large numbers, a probability of 0.05 doesn't mean a hell of a lot. But a lot of the time in biology you are not dealing with large numbers. Sample sizes in the tens or hundreds are pretty typical. For those kind of sample sizes there is a whole branch of statistics which specifically deal with small samples - things like Student's t-test and so on. When you are doing that sort of thing, getting p < 0.05 generally does mean something significant.

    Sadly, a lot of people in biology don't really understand what the stats are doing, so 0.05 gets treated as a magic number. Hey, I got p < 0.05, it must be true!

    This is particularly true in epidemiology, which is one branch where sample sizes usually are large. Data trawling looking for correlations at p < 0.05 is just bad science.

    It seems to me that this is another consequence of the dumbing down of science, and the insistence that all science has to be "applied". If you don't teach the theoretical underpinnings of pure science, then applied science is just bullshit.

  10. archie lukas
    Coat

    Lies, damn lies and statistics

    Good to see someone challenging this plethora of meaningless statistics, 68.25% of which are made up on the spot!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Oh, my...

    @Damien...

    "That would be the lethal strain of cannabis then..."

    For some bizarre reason, my mind parsed this as the 'lethal strain of cannibals.'

  12. Chris Long

    Helmets

    Reminds of a proposed road-safety measure - put an 8-inch steel spike in the centre of all car steering wheels. Drivers might then tend to be a bit more cautious.

    Cycle helmets work in the opposite direction... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation (I haven't actually read this yet, I'm just hoping that it supports my position).

  13. Philip

    RE: The Doctor, and the rare disease...

    Right this is a long thread, so this hopefully won't get read....

    There is this disease, that affects all people in equal proportion at a rate of 1 in 100 000. Assuming your a normalish human being, your chances of getting the disease is 1/100 000.

    Now you go to the doctor for a routine check up (ie. the disease doesn't present any symptoms except sudden death) where he does a battery of tests. Guess what, the test comes back positive for sudden death disease.

    "Lucky" for you, there is a cure, that is 100% effective, but which kills you if you don't have the disease. The doctor then tells you the test for the disease is 90% accurate. That is, if it says you don't have it, there is a 10% chance that you actually do, and if it says you don't, there is a 10% chance that actually you do.

    Thus, the question is, what is the probability that you have the disease, given that the test was positive?

    Applying Bayes' Theorem, hopefully correctly, gives:

    (0.90*0.000 01)/(.9*0.000 01 + 0.1*0.999 9)

    = 9 in 111 119 or roughly 0.0081%

    or roughly 1 in 10 000.

    So, no, don't take the "cure", except if your feeling really unlucky, who knows, you could be the 1 in 100 000 person who actually has the disease.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

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