Sunday, June 19, 2005

Scaremongering criticized

Some UK scientists are criticizing the Lancet for it' s scaremongering...like overblown scares of the MMR vaccine problems, and overblowing the risk of hormone replacement therapy...

The scientists claim it was done to get headlines, even though the result was people harmed because they followed the advice (How many kids will die or be brain damaged from measles because their parents won't let them get the vaccine? How many old ladies will end up with hip fractures because they didn't take their hormones?)

At the end of the article, they mention the "100 000 dead" in Iraq from the Lancet, which was suspiciously printed a week before the presidential elections (later more accurate polls put the number at one fifth of that number: the Lancet study extrapolated from high casualty areas to the entire country so was not statistically accurate...)

And, showing that pigs fly not only in London, the Washington Post has an article from a Russian dissadent about the "american gulag" containing this quoted conversation:

Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty's executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the "gulag of our time."

"Don't you think that there's an enormous difference?" I asked him.



"Sure," he said, "but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees."

The problem with both articles is that words have meanings, and scaremongering leads to overreaction and fear on one hand, and then to cynicism and disbelief on the other hand...

What ever happened to reasoned discussion? The end result will be, as the WAPO article points out, no reasonable discussion of a mild problem that could be fixed...

Chicken Little O'Reilley, call your office...

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