{"id":94,"date":"2012-10-18T23:05:05","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T04:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/?p=94"},"modified":"2012-10-18T23:05:05","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T04:05:05","slug":"the-need-to-scoop-vs-accurate-repoting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/2012\/10\/18\/the-need-to-scoop-vs-accurate-repoting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Need to Scoop vs. Accurate Repoting"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, this is starting to make me mad.<\/p>\n

In this case, someone reported that a paper being presented at the American Association for Cancer Research<\/a> annual meeting is making a certain claim.\u00a0 I don’t know who reported it first, but all the outlets I’ve seen for this ‘paper’ have the exact same information.\u00a0 Here’s Doctortipster<\/a>.\u00a0 Here’s Science Daily<\/a>. Here’s something called Eurekaalert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Every one of these is reporting that for every month a baby is fed formula, that baby has a 16% greater chance of getting Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)<\/a>.\u00a0 That’s all that it says.<\/p>\n

I consider this almost a form of fear-mongering.\u00a0 A 16% greater chance could be a child having a 0.1% chance of getting ALL to having a 0.116% chance of getting ALL.\u00a0 Or it could mean a 75% chance of getting ALL increasing to a 87% chance. We don’t know.<\/p>\n

In this case, in every case that I can think of, having a percentage increase is utterly useless information.\u00a0 Without the baseline information, without the starting value, a percentage increase is useless.<\/p>\n

Since this is the sort of thing I do (sigh, I need a life).\u00a0 I started looking for some numbers.<\/p>\n

The American Cancer society reports that the incident of ALL in the US is about\u00a0 1 in 50,000<\/a>. There were 5700 new cases in all of the US in 2009.\u00a0 There were less than 1500 deaths due to it.<\/p>\n

So, the apparent chance of a baby getting this is 0.002%.\u00a0 With this new research, that increases by 0.00032% each month that the child is on formula.\u00a0 Plus, there’s a better than 75% survival rate for this particular form of cancer.<\/p>\n

Is this worth getting seriously worked up over?\u00a0 You decide.\u00a0 Maybe your family has a lot of risk factors; history of leukemia, smokers in the house, etc.\u00a0 If so, then MAYBE this is a concern.\u00a0 But I would think that starting a baby on solid food a month or two early would be less likely to reduce the chances of cancer than removing the smokers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, this is starting to make me mad. In this case, someone reported that a paper being presented at the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,58,11],"tags":[60,31,59,15],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-medicine","category-skepticism","tag-acute-lymphoblastic-leukemia","tag-cancer","tag-luekemia","tag-skepticism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}