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Posted on 06/10/2002 9:02:28 AM PDT by Retired Chemist
WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists revising a study of tiny pollution particles from diesel engines and power plants found a computer glitch that might mean less health risk than previously thought and could delay new federal rules.
Research by investigators at Johns Hopkins University's biostatistics department indicates the software used for the study of 90 large American cities was overestimating the rise in the typical mortality rate.
The study is just one of more than 100 the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) is examining as it prepares to issue regulations next year. But the software in question could be a problem because it is used by many of the studies, agency spokesman Joe Martyak, said Wednesday.
"Our deadline for getting this out is the end of 2003 and this software issue may impact our ability to meet that deadline," Martyak said. "We still believe strongly in the tie between the particulate matter and the health effects that it creates."
The original study found pollution particles responsible for higher death rates and more hospital stays among the elderly. It was released in June 2000 by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Health Effects Institute, which paid for the research. The institute is funded in equal parts by the EPA and the auto industry.
The new research does not undermine the widely accepted link between air pollution and premature death. But it cut by half the previous estimate about the rate of increase in the death rate when measured by increases in the number of particles in the air.
"Depending on the city, and the trends of air pollution, mortality and weather in that city," the software "can bias the estimate of relative risk of air pollution upward or downward," institute president Dan Greenbaum wrote colleagues about the new findings.
The study looked at tiny atmospheric particles of 10 microns or less in diameter. A micron is equal to one-thousandth of a millimeter.
Is it a belief system or is it science?
Oh, it's the EPA, never mind...
How about the revocation of the rules?
Study Ties Pollution, Risk of Lung Cancer" proclaimed the Washington Post in a front-page, above-the-fold headline this week. "Soot particles strongly tied to lung cancer, study says" blared the New York Times. "The results are likely to influence political debate and lead to tougher regulations," reported the Wall Street Journal.
Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association March 6, the study reports fine particulate air pollution causes people living in the most heavily polluted cities to die at a 12 percent greater rate of lung cancer than people in the least polluted areas.
What’s really gasping for breath, though, is the basic science and honesty that’s been steamrolled by the EPA and its researcher henchmen.
The researchers couldn’t possibly draw the conclusion that fine particulates cause lung cancer from this study because it was only statistical in nature, not scientific. Assuming no shenanigans on the part of the researchers - a big assumption as you will soon see - the researchers only developed weak statistical correlations between air pollution levels and lung cancer rates.
Statistics is not science and these extremely marginal correlations don’t even rate as statistics.
The researchers had no data on how much fine particulate air pollution was inhaled by even one of the 500,000 study subjects. Instead the researchers simply guessed at how much fine particulates study subjects might have inhaled - more like eeny-meeny-miny-mo than science. Not one lung cancer death in the study population was medically linked with fine particulate air pollution. The study subjects’ lung cancers could easily have been caused by smoking - about 90 percent of lung cancer occurs among smokers - or other lung cancer risk factors
I declare, I'm just pole-axed.
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