THE CONTROL EXPERIMENT

In health statistics, there is the control population to give a comparison with the population investigated, and it is also what is most often absent in the sham statistics by the charlatans who scream about leukemia and cancer in the nuclear industry as they chase after the publicity that they were unable to get by honest work.

Cancers for example. The proportionate mortality ratio (deaths per 100,000 per year in a given group) due to malignant neoplasms among the Hanford atomic workers was 111.

Appalling, isn't it? They die like flies in Hanford

But wait: What is the PMR for other occupations in Washington State? For brickmasons, 116. For postal clerks 119. Students, 172. Plumbers, 130.

And leukemia? Now here, we must concede, there really is an occupational risk, but watch which way it goes: The PMR for atomic workers is 49; for bankers, it is 183; bus drivers, 172; dairymen, 188; and God help the poultrymen with 269 per 100,000 per year. If they were as reckless with statistics as Sternglass, Mancuso & Co., they would immediately know what to do about it: put a little plutonium in the chickenfeed.

Recoil from this pink paper! It has gone through Jefferson County, Colorado, to reach you; that's where Rocky Flats kills off all the babies except those who grow old enough to contract cancer and leukemia, and where Ginsburg, Ellsberg and other saviors get themselves arrested once a week to stop the carnage.

The infant mortality in Jefferson County (and also Mesa County, with the uranium mills in Grand Junction) is 11.6. The average for all of Colorado is 13.0.

Cancer mortality in Jefferson County is 120 (per 100,000/year), which is also the Colorado average. In Mesa County it is 145, but there are 20 other Colorado counties where it is higher, and it is still well below the US national average of 175.8

Another favorite trick of the charlatans is to use control populations, but to make the investigated population small. Suppose there are 10 one eyed twins named Beatrice in the US. If two of these Beatrices should one day happen to be in New Orleans, then Louisiana has suddenly become the outbreak of an acute epidemic, for the number of one eyed twin Beatrices will have shot up to more than 60 times the national average.

This trick is used when pointing to leukemia cases in Grand Junction, Colo., a community with about 20,000 population; the total number of leukemia deaths in all of the US is 15,000 per year, resulting in relatively large, but meaningless fluctuations in small communities. If we were as dishonest as the charlatans, we could point to the leukemia death rate among Boeing aircraft workers in Seattle. which was almost 2.7 times higher than among atomic workers in Hanford without adding that in 21 years there were only 3 such deaths in Hanford and only 29 among Boeing workers.

Statistics can always be easily abused by brainwashers. Our favorite is Mayor Beame who panhandled for money to save the city that the social engineers had bankrupted; to gain sympathy for New York's poverty, he pointed out that half of its population had an income below the national median.

What he did not say was that the other half had an income above it.

[More: The numerical data are taken from tables kindly made available by Dr Ralph Lapp, whose book The Radiation Controversy, will soon be published by Reddy Communications, Greenwich, Conn.]