Fukushima Meltdown Driving Increased Abnormalities Among US Infants

[caseymoz]

154. Do you understand what a 28% rise in CH means?

It sounds like an epidemic when you put it into a percentage. What it really means isinstead of 4 in 10,000 incidence of congenital hypothyroidism, which is the normal incidence of the disease, you have 5 in 10,000.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/pediatricgenetics/data.html

That's in a limited area of five states, not the US overall, and as far as you know from that article, in the US overall CH has gone down in the same period, thus balancing he increase out. There is that possibility.

The 28 percent rise means in a city of a million, you'd see 100 more cases. Now that's sad and significant, but it can't be confused with the death of every first born.

Moreover, the incidence of CH has been rising nationwide for the last decade, before Fukishima.

A fluctuation in a number that small in a restricted area can happen with normal variance. What has the variance of CH been year to year? Without knowing that, you definitely can't tell if this rise is even abnormal.

Oh, and correlation does not equal causation. An increase in CH does not mean Fukishima caused it.

This article's slant is unsupportable. The reporter did not understand the science she was reporting on. Neither do the people who are grabbing onto this as a nuclear catastrophe from the across the Pacific Ocean.

There's enough reason to hate the nuclear power, hate the nuclear industry, and hate the politicians that support it. We don't need to indulge in disreputable overkill.

The problem with this sort of panicky thinking is it might scare people against nukes until they realize that most children aren't going to die from this. In fact, they increase is imperceptible without surveys and statistics. Then, those same people are not going to believe the anti-nuke side again even when the science against it is sound. They'll remember the anti-nukes being deceitful, even when the deceit wasn't intended.

It's comparable to Fox news and Obama. After they've told us he's going send the storm troopers to kick down our doors and take all the White Women and then convert everybody else to Islam, they've lost credibility by the 2012 election when nothing of the sort has happened.

That's what the science actually tells you.