Dr. Janet Sherman reports that the recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:
4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)
10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg. 12.50 per week)
This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.
4 comments:
The study is an embarassingly low attempt by Sherman and Mangano to scare people by cheating with the statistics. There should be enough material for anti-nukes after Fukushima without making up stuff in this way. What does it say about their credibility in earlier "studies"?
More on it here:
http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/17/shame-on-you-janette-sherman-and-joseph-mangano/
@Lantzelot - Thank you for providing additional data.
I sent a note to Sherman asking for the raw data, but have had no reply.
Your data would indicate that there hadn't been a spike in US infant mortality rates.
@Mark,
I have now added links to the CDC data base in the bottom of the blog post so that you can check for yourself. I have also updated with links to others who have looked into the same thing (including Scientific American).
The story continues though. CounterPunch got complaints from several readers and had their statistical consultant go through the data. He also found that Sherman and Mangano have cherry-picked the data, but remarkably he also found an even worse effect for a few cities. I have checked the numbers very carefully and it seems as if CounterPunch needs to make a much-raking investigation on the skills of their statistics consultant, I am not sure from which planet he picked the numbers.
More on it here:
http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/21/counterpunch-verifies-infant-mortality-fraud-but-seems-to-create-one-themselves/
P.S. I put a comment on Sherman's blog post regarding the study, asking her to explain herself. So far it has not been accepted, and my guess is that it is not in her interest to accept it or respond to it, she is probably too busy cooking up new stories to scare people with.
P.S.2. I am pro-nuclear, but my main interest is that people who engage in the debate about nuclear power are using real facts for their argumentation, not fake studies like the present one.
@Lantzelot - Thanks for the additional information - I am pro-data.
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