Study: Living Near Fracking Correlates With Increased Hospital Visits 132
New submitter Michael Tiemann writes: An article published in PLOS One finds increased hospital admissions significantly correlate with living in the same zip code as active fracking sites. The data comes from three counties in Pennsylvania, whose zip codes mostly had no fracking sites in 2007 and transitioned to a majority of zip codes with at least one fracking site. While the statistical and medical data are compelling, and speak to a significant correlation, the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate. Nevertheless, with open data and Creative Commons licensing, the paper could be rewritten to provide a more compelling explanation about the dangers of fracking to people who live within its vicinity, and perhaps motivate more stringent regulations to protect them from both immediate and long-term harm.
Re:Living near hospital trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, receiving a monthly royalty check from the gas company increases your disposable income, and means you can spend more on things like health care.
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Also, receiving a monthly royalty check from the gas company increases your disposable income, and means you can spend more on things like health care.
Similarly, as they said, fracking areas may have more temporary residents employed doing the fracking, which would raise the hospital admissions but not the denominator they used, which was the number of PERMANENT residents, thereby raising the admission rate.
What's a Tufte test? (Score:3)
What the heck is a Tufte test? Normally I would Google it but.... actually I did Google it and I still can't figure it out.
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I wouldn't call the statistics overly compelling either. They ran enough tests that they were likely to come up with at least one positive result. What they should do is use the few positive results that they've recorded here and verify them by conducting the same experimental procedure in different locations where fracking is also occurring to see if the same results are being seen.
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Thanks. I did see his link on Google but there was no mention to a specific "test".
Makes sense.
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Thanks. I did see his link on Google but there was no mention to a specific "test".
Makes sense.
The ultimate Tufte test, of course, was at the Rogers Commission on the Space Shuttle Failure; Feynman dipping the O-ring in ice water and showing that it lost its resilience for a few seconds, vs the voluminous pages of tables and diagrams produced by engineers before the launch which had failed to communicate the same message, despite containing the data correctly describing the phenomenon with great precision.
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Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:4, Funny)
Here, I found an entire web site dedicated to helping find these correlations! http://www.tylervigen.com/spur... [tylervigen.com]
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Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:5, Insightful)
It means that these people are trying to RAM smoke up your arse, but cannot make it look convincing enough even then,
so want help to polish the turd.
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam, but dont even have the ability to do that it seems.
Perhaps they need to ban Icecream first.
Killer Icecream [slate.com]
The obvious problem here is that there is almost certainly a correlation between these locations and poorer communities,
which also have a very well established correlation with increased health issues.
The scary thing is that this is even being reported. Congratulations Slashdot. It almost but not quite makes it to satire!
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Speaking of correlation, has anyone else noticed that Randall shows on those maps that Vermont has a disproportionate number of fans of furry porn? (And maybe also Austin? And a random patch of desert in southern Arizona?)
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Not Vermont's fault.
It is Bernie Sanders throwing the curve off.
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You do know where you are, right? We are *all* perverts.
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Which reminds me of a bad joke...
What is the difference between kinky and perverted?
If you are kinky you use a feather. If you are perverted you use the whole chicken.
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:4, Interesting)
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam
Except that in this case we have an intervention study, as some areas started fracking activity while other did not. Therefore looking at data versus time will tell us something.
And I also not we have explanations for causation. I see two obvious: chemical leaks, and nocebo effect.
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, the economy in the area improves and now more people can afford to get their health problems looked at. Unless specific billing codes are increasing, this is the second most likely explanation. The most likely explanation is that they did a bunch of tests and didn't correct for multiple testing in their stats.
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Yep, and that's the point of this study. It has found a correlation, setting up the next stage which is to determine the cause. It's not making a conclusion, it's just saying that there is something worth looking in to here.
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, the economy in the area improves and now more people can afford to get their health problems looked at. Unless specific billing codes are increasing, this is the second most likely explanation. The most likely explanation is that they did a bunch of tests and didn't correct for multiple testing in their stats.
Another very likely explanation is that the correlation is cherry-picked. A good way to achieve a study like this is to look for correlations across numerous statistics (e.g. health costs, mortality rate, days of work missed due to illness, etc., etc., it's easy to come up with a dozen proxies for "health"), and if you cast a net wide enough you're statistically guaranteed to find at least one with a correlation that exceeds the standard threshold for statistical significance. The definition of "statistical significance" ensures it. Then you publish that one while discarding the rest.
Moreover, you can achieve this same effect merely by having many research teams tackle aspects of the question. The negative results will go unpublished, or published in obscure journals and receive no mainstream press attention, while the one that "hits" shows up on slashdot, and not even the researchers will believe they've done anything wrong.
Or maybe the correlation is real, in which case we'll eventually find a cause. Time will tell, but it general goes against the sky-is-falling types.
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They studied a whole three counties. Three... I would go so far as to suggest the statistic source is a little bit too small to start extrapolating. Of course more funding is required and more studies need to be done.
On the other hand, squirting unknown crap into the ground may impact the health of those who are in the area due to groundwater contamination. News at 11:00.
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This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it ca
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This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.
The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?
The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.
When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.
No, they did a Bonferroni correction; this is a correction for multiple tests, i.e. looking at 25 different discharge code categories you can't use p.05 any more, because that means you'd find one bogus correlation out of every 20 tests. The Bonferroni version is .00096 for 25 simultaneous tests which I'll take their word for, meaning that you'd only expect to see a bogus correlation in basically 1 out of a thousand tests, which off the top of my head seems OK if you're only doing 25. This is the part w
their data says admissions did NOT increase (Score:3)
The study authors say there was no fracking in 2007, and lots in 2011.
They then say (quoting):
"The inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007â"2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007â"2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25"
So the introduction of fracking did NOT increase hospital admissions. Indeed, over the four year that the economy in the area got a boost from fracking, people got healthier, according to the numbers in the study.
Then then d
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I understand the overall numbers show nothing statically significant, but that some local numbers show a more interesting pattern? This is investigation, not gymnastics.
numbers show that wells and admissions are rural (Score:2)
The local numbers show that admissions did not increase during the period in which fracking was introduced, and that certain zip codes (rural areas) has higher admissions first, then later got wells. As wells were built, health improved - probably because it brought jobs, which improves the local economy.
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The study authors say there was no fracking in 2007, and lots in 2011.
They then say (quoting): "The inpatient rates are relatively stable from 2007â"2011 Indeed, the average overall inpatient prevalence rates for 2007â"2011 are, respectively, 15.18, 15.30, 14.86, 14.00, 14.25"
So the introduction of fracking did NOT increase hospital admissions. Indeed, over the four year that the economy in the area got a boost from fracking, people got healthier, according to the numbers in the study.
Then then do a bunch of gymnastics to discover, then obscure, the fact that oil wells tend to be located in more rural areas, and people's health tends to be slightly worse in those areas.
yes, bingo! i'm glad to see somebody interprets the data shown in the same way I do.
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They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam
Except that in this case we have an intervention study, as some areas started fracking activity while other did not. Therefore looking at data versus time will tell us something.
And I also not we have explanations for causation. I see two obvious: chemical leaks, and nocebo effect.
But I can't see where they really looked at data versus time, in the way we need to see; ie. we'd like to see increase in fracking (in any of a number of metrics) associated with increase in hospitalization rate. Ideally it would be a nice continuous function. At minimum, four numbers: baseline hospitalization rate before (b) and after (a) fracking, in places with (1) and without (2) fracking. We'd need to see that (a1-b1)> (a2-b2). I do not see that anywhere in the paper. In fact, they state explicitly
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move in more people, there will be more hospital visits
There's another shocking health statistic (Score:1)
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That's because rich people don't want fracking operations anywhere near their families.
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You mean like the Beverly Hills Oil Field?
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. The oil was found and drilling started in 1895 before their were rich people there. But no fracking on the Beverly Hills Oil Field in 2015, even though 2/3 of the oil underneath will require it.
And that's because the people who live there have the means to prevent it. You will also note that the oil rigs are hidden behind soundproof walls.
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I wonder why the oil and natural gas deposits only formed under the ground where poor people live.
Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
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Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
An acre of oil field pays better than an acre of farmland. However, an acre of downtown Houston pays better than an acre of oil field.
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There are a lot of factors.
1. States that allow fracking normally republican, also poorly implement the ACA/Obama Care so they can get political points to show that it doesn't work.
2. Increase in blue collar industrial jobs. The reason why these jobs get paid a bit more is to compensate for increased risk. Now that could be from people who are working in many other fields.
3. Population shift. Families move out, high risk taker single guys come in, with heavy drinking.
That is just a few on the top of my head
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The funny one is, I personally "live near fracking sites" and laugh at how incredibly uneducated about fracking the standard anti-fracking person is. For example, most of what people call fracking sites are actually just gas wells with no active fracking happening. They don't seem to realize that fracking only happens for a few weeks at specific locations where the gas is hard to extract. Maybe a week when they first drill the well, and then some maintenance fracking when gas production slows down. It's
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The funny one is, I personally "live near fracking sites" and laugh at how incredibly uneducated about fracking the standard anti-fracking person is. For example, most of what people call fracking sites are actually just gas wells with no active fracking happening. They don't seem to realize that fracking only happens for a few weeks at specific locations where the gas is hard to extract. Maybe a week when they first drill the well, and then some maintenance fracking when gas production slows down. It's not continuous.
They also notice the elevated methane levels in the air around here compared to LA, yet don't seem to realize that the cows around here that are missing in LA might possibly be a contributing factor to that. That and the methane levels around here are still 1/100th of what's considered a safe level.
Yeah, fracking has become a synonym for everything bad associated with oil and gas extraction. Much as gluten and/or GMO have become catchall terms for everything wrong with our agricultural industry.
Before and after (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Before and after (Score:5, Interesting)
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
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You should know by now that "peer review" is just a fancy word for having your buddies fawn over your crap.
Climate science and "Social Science" have perverted the peer review process into a politically correct old boys club.
Boldly expressed like somebody who doesn't have the faintest idea of how science, publishing, and peer review are done. Your peers doing the peer review are your competitors in a cutthroat competition for ever more scarce research funding. It's like getting Chrysler and Ford to peer review GM.
I would be interested to hear your concept of how "having your buddies fawn over your cra" leads to getting more research money, though.
Could it be you're confusing peer review with "having the corporate board set e
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That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls
It accounts for the fact that having drilling rigs is going to increase hospital visits because it's inherently more dangerous? I would be surprised if the placement of any drilling rig did not raise the visits to hospitals.
It just seems like a really bad metric as the effects of Fracking, if in fact there were any, would take much longer to man
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That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls
It accounts for the fact that having drilling rigs is going to increase hospital visits because it's inherently more dangerous? I would be surprised if the placement of any drilling rig did not raise the visits to hospitals.
It just seems like a really bad metric as the effects of Fracking, if in fact there were any, would take much longer to manifest.
Bingo on both points; they do mention them, however, where they discuss limitations of the study. They don't discuss the biggest limitation, however, which is that they didn't actually find any effect.
Both apply (Score:4, Informative)
1) An incredibly small population.
Which describes all fracking sites exactly - they are in remote communities.
2) An incredibly dangerous working environment.
No, it does not have to be "incredibly" dangerous. Just MORE dangerous than work in the surrounding area, which if you are in some remote mostly bedroom or farming community is absolutely going to be true for any complex mechanical complex which has frequent shipping and operation. "Hospital visits" is extremely vague and can include something like a small cut which most people would just patch up but which a company has to send to a doctor for examination for legal reasons.
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If working on a drilling rig causes enough injuries to cause a statistically visible increase in hospital visits, you're looking at one of two things: 1) An incredibly small population. 2) An incredibly dangerous working environment.
In the case of #2, that's a working environment dangerous to the degree where they are definitely skipping required safety measures.
Ah, but there's a subtle point they mention in the discussion of limitations to the study: any added hospitalizations from the workers are added to the numerator of the rate, but the number of workers is not added to the denominator, which is just the permanent residents of the area. So you are essentially guaranteed to raise the hospitalization rate, just by that process.
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Living near the area of the study and the shalefields its a start and hopefully additional study will tell more. Our state gov't has ignored those who have been harmed from contaminated water and bad air. Our PA Department of Health tells us to merely close the window and turn on the air conditioning but not everyone has it. I live in the country to be able to keep my windows open this time of year and don't have air conditioning. Residents with contaminated water still have water buffaloes for washing
This is STATISTICS, not SCIENCE (Score:2)
This study does not explain anything, because correlation != causation. The correlation could be entirely unrelated to fracking, for all we know, because they chose to spend their money on statistics, not on the scientific method. Imagine what it would have been like if they attempted to prove that fracking causes health problems by repeatable experimentation. Now, that would be interesting.
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That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
How is it controlled for by randomness? If you're randomizing a population for cardiology admissions, for instance, after you randomize you run a t-test or F-test or similar between your groups to demonstrate that there is NO significant difference in rates at the beginning of the intervention. In this case, the significant difference was there both before and after the introduction of the fracking. If there was any randomization (hard to argue there was, choice of area to do fracking in is NOT random), it
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Why do you think rich people don't want fracking sites near their homes? I'm sure it's just coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that they're making people sick.
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They also don't want power-generating windmills near their homes. Is that because they cause cancer? And water treatment plants are generally not built in wealthy neighborhoods. Is this due to leukemia clusters? And they don't want adult video stores near their homes. Because of increased risk of polio?
Perhaps the NIMBY effect is slipshod and broad brushed against any disruption of the neighborhood, whether rationional or not.
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"Adult video stores"? Do they still have those?
And perhaps they know that living
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This is also a pretty small sample size. I would be hesitant to draw any conclusions.
They took data from just 3 towns - 2 with fracking and 1 without.
Show me data across, day, 100 towns or so, including rates before and after the fracking started, and you will have something interesting to talk about - especially if the increases all relate to very specific kinds of illnesses.
But just 3? Sorry. Not good enough.
flunk every test...."and perhaps motivate" (Score:1)
I am sure that rising rates of health insurance (Score:3)
from people being employed in the areas had nothing to do with more people going to hospitals.
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The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.
Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go)
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So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement?
There's your problem. It's not the experiments it's the lack of scientific method. There is no mechanism involved. It's no better than the saturated fat vs non saturated fat.
Until you are able to demand a bit of rigor you will always be misled by those with a vested interest in the outcomes.
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The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.
Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go).
So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement? Is there any standard for a controlled natural experiment you'd actually accept? From the structure of your comment I suspect not, as you never once mention the caliber of controls actually used (which is, for maximal troll-seed efficiency, entirely beneath the notice of those who reject the entire category).
Done right, I view this as a form of agile econometrics. First you see what clears the fence under modest controls, before gold-plating round two.
On the other side, blanket cynicism is a crutch of the anti-progressive mindset.
Yes, but... they do have, not quite before and after with a control, but timed data over a period where fracking was increasing, to a different degree in the different areas. That's as good as before and after, in some ways better though more complex (as you say, controlling for income would be nice).
The big problem is that, given this, they found NO effect. And published anyway
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Totally agree with this. It is the money that comes with fracking that is causing the increase in hospital visits.
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I was thinking much the same thing. I didn't read the article but am wondering how much of this increase coincided with the PACA and the expansion of medicaid.
But if we are looking at poor areas with an infusion of money, of course people will be more active then they used to be and this alone should cause an uptick in hospital or doctors visits.
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You weren't wondering at all. If you were really interested you would have read the article. You're just trying to pick at this with your own personal agenda and you don't give a flying fuck what the facts are. A typical goose stepper.
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lol.. and what's it to you. Outside of being wrong, I doubt you even have a fucking clue. Some crap that doesn't scale with the page on the article's site blocks the text when I try to enlarge the text enough to even read it on my phone. That is why I haven't read it but with defenders like you, I'm positive it is just drivel not worth reading anyways.
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You weren't wondering at all. If you were really interested you would have read the article. You're just trying to pick at this with your own personal agenda and you don't give a flying fuck what the facts are. A typical goose stepper.
He who steps with the goose must be careful of stepping on the goose's gifts.
War is hell...and so is an oil boom. (Score:4, Informative)
I worked in the Bakken oil/gas fields during the first two years of the boom, having grown up in the area.
It wreaks utter havoc on a community. Huge numbers of strangers move in, heavy equipment swarms all over the countryside, traffic goes from light to gridlock, all social and other services are crushed under the load, and the local economy turns upside down. In short, it's very stressful for pretty much everybody. It would not surprise me at all if a boom in local oil/gas development raises stress related problems (like heart attacks and mental health issues.)
But I don't see any evidence (or rational) supporting an assumption that the fracking portion of this larger whirlpool of human activity and chaos is in of itself the cause. The correlation makes sense for less exotic reasons.
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But I don't see any evidence (or rational) supporting an assumption that the fracking portion of this larger whirlpool of human activity and chaos is in of itself the cause. The correlation makes sense for less exotic reasons.
That was the obvious next study to conduct even before you said that: what, if any, change happens in the rate of hospital visits in zip codes that had no oil drilling at all and now have solely conventional drilling?
The quoted increases of 0.07% and 0.06% for cardiology and neurology visits are so tiny that it's extremely likely to be visible in that case too. It's just industry, and real jobs.
Fracking... (Score:1)
Truthers are here....
Less McDonalds, more hospitalizations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that during that study period sales at McDonalds across the nation were dropping. We thus can conclude that reduced sales at McDonalds leads to higher number of hospital visits.
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Being hungry, while working with industrial equipment can lead to dangerious mistakes.
I wouldn't make a diet from it, but it is better then starving.
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Note that during that study period sales at McDonalds across the nation were dropping. We thus can conclude that reduced sales at McDonalds leads to higher number of hospital visits.
Actually, you may have something; the paper states that the number of hospital visits went down over the period. Both nationally, and also in the fracking areas.
If you wonder exactly how that leads to the conclusion "fracking linked to more hospital admissions" you're not alone.
Naturally in proximity to the hold my beer crowd (Score:1)
I bet (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet living near hospitals correlates to more hospital visits too.
Re:I bet (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd sure as hell try to steer clear of hospitals. Most people in the developed world die in hospitals!
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I'd steer clear of cemeteries too; a majority of dead americans' corpses have been found in such a place
Effect sizes are microscopic (Score:3, Insightful)
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PLOS is a for-pay journal publishing junk science that feeds the confirmation bias of the malcontents that inhabit places like Slashdot.
PLOS has its plusses and minuses. For those who really believe in Open Science and making the data available to the widest audience possible, it's a bold step forward. But there is also the perception that publishing in PLOS is one step above self-publishing; if your list of publications contains a lot of PLOS, you're viewed as a dud.
.06% "Compelling" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
"...the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate" -- Says so much about the author of the post. .06% increase in a data set of this size is compelling? It stinks when the data doesn't fit one's preconceived notions.That's one of the the beauties of science and why healthy scepticism is required.
Mm. Looking at their tables yet again I discover that the median number of visits for cardiology is 18. (total visits, not per hundred). That's the specialty with the highest number of visits. I think the next highest number was 10. Good grief.
Active fracking? (Score:4, Interesting)
Active fracking is an activity measured in days. Most of the life of a well is simply pumping...
Bullshit (Score:3)
http://journals.plos.org/ploso... [plos.org]
Look at their graph and compare the first year with the last year. They're so f'ing similar.
Beyond that, consider they're not showing you how many illnesses anyone had... just hospital visits. Thus they could be going to the hospitals because idiots in the media scared them and it is causing a clearly very small uptick in hypochondria.
If I had a super power... it would be to urinate in the faces of people that push this shit.
Please contradict me. I would love to be wrong. I really would be... No really. this garbage depresses me with how dumb it is and if I just made stupid mistakes then that would be on me. I'd much prefer that. No really.
Until that happens... I'm going to be exposing myself to gamma rays and letting odd radioactive insects bite me on the off chance that I'll get the super power the world both needs and deserves.
Re: (Score:2)
You might actually want to look into DDT and the scientific studies that have been done since the faulty studies done in the '60s and '70s. There is a reason that the WHO has brought back the use of DDT. Not using DDT resulted in more deaths than using DDT ever could. Then again, deaths from malaria are a third world problem and not glamorous so few people actually pay attention to it. Oddly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seems to think it is a priority and, even stranger, they seem to think Viagra i
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Yep.
The anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria which if deliberate would put them up there with the nastiest powers ever.
The kids getting sprayed with DDT in the face didn't suffer ill effects. Everyone has seen those old videos of the kids in the pool sprayed with DDT. And that is used as an example of hubris.
But... do they cite how many of those kids that got sprayed... In the face... actually suffered any kind of ill effects?
Nope. On that point they go dark fo
Re: (Score:1)
I am too lazy to look it up but my understanding is that even the bird shell being thinner conclusion was actually based on fraudulent (not even erroneous) data - as in they made it up. I read a peer-reviewed study about it some years ago. It was paired with another study about the disaster that banning DDT caused and touched on the impact it also had on science as it was damned difficult finding other studies (they simply refused to publish them but the authors managed to find them anyhow but it took a lot
Re: (Score:2)
google is really easy to use. Try this search term:
"DDT bird shell fraud" I got a few hits. I didn't know that the bird shell thing was a fraud as well. That is truly despicable. This means much of the enviro movement was predicated on a complete fabrication.
The price in lives can thus be justifiably hung around the necks of the people that did it. Horrific.
That said... the links were not entire conclusive... but enough to put the issue strongly into question.
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I have read them in the past but was too lazy to look - I figured you knew how to use Google though. ;)
And yes, it is despicable. Unfortunately we can not do too many real-world studies on it here in this country any more. It is still outlawed, or it was when I was reading about this years ago. While the WHO has made it legit for use in malaria-filled areas it is still not lawful to use or create here as I recall. It would be nice to see some additional studies made simply so that science can restore its na
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If I were losing that many people to malaria I don't think I'd care much what the WHO had to say about it. I'd place an order for the stuff and spray away.
If the WHO wants to get dosed in DDT they can show up and complain about it.
As to studies... I have to believe they can do lab studies on it in the US. Use it in the open? No... but in a lab? Feed it to the rats? Sure. Why not? They take apart the cute little critters brains and feed them worse so why not a little DDT in the kibble?
Re: (Score:1)
If I were losing that many people to malaria I don't think I'd care much what the WHO had to say about it. I'd place an order for the stuff and spray away.
If the WHO wants to get dosed in DDT they can show up and complain about it.
As to studies... I have to believe they can do lab studies on it in the US. Use it in the open? No... but in a lab? Feed it to the rats? Sure. Why not? They take apart the cute little critters brains and feed them worse so why not a little DDT in the kibble?
Put it back in your pants hero boy. There is not, and never was, any WHO ban on DDT use to fight malarial mosquitoes, or any other disease vector. Notice the key words: "WHO approved". http://www.alibaba.com/product... [alibaba.com]
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You're right.
However, getting international funding for DDT programs is almost impossible and several countries have been compelled diplomatically to ban the use with predictable results.
Mexico and South Africa were both pressured by the United States to ban DDT. Mexico did it to get the US to pass the Free Trade agreement and I forget what South Africa was getting out of it.
The point is that the only way you can use DDT is if you give a finger to the whole first world and that's hard to do.
What is sick is
Re: (Score:1)
Yep.
The anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria which if deliberate would put them up there with the nastiest powers ever.
The kids getting sprayed with DDT in the face didn't suffer ill effects. Everyone has seen those old videos of the kids in the pool sprayed with DDT. And that is used as an example of hubris.
But... do they cite how many of those kids that got sprayed... In the face... actually suffered any kind of ill effects?
Nope. On that point they go dark for some reason. Which is odd because if there were ill effects you'd assume they'd cite them. It would have made their case stronger. But... nothing. Which contextually implies that they didn't cite it because actually there weren't any ill effects.
Does DDT harm eagles? Apparently. If I had to choose between eagles and millions of my own people annually... I'd fucking genocide the eagles. I mean... I'd try and keep the species going in a zoo or something. But I'm not sacrificing millions of people for some eagles.
Oh BS on the "anti DDT lobby could arguably be cited for much of the annual death toll to malaria " lie. If for no other reason, that there was never any ban on using DDT to fight malaria mosquitoes; it is only banned for commercial use, like cotton plantations. And, if you have any sort of understanding of resistance, you will realize that ending the 99% of DDT use (not exaggerating) that does not involve malaria will extend the effectiveness of the 1% of use which still remains, because you're not making
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We have statistics on malaria rates before DDT, during DDT, and after it was no longer used.
You are right that the WHO did not ban it. You are wrong that the lobby did not cause it to be banned in any country making heavy use of it. And the results have been consistent.
Malaria rates in Mexico for example have gone up more than ten times their previous rate simply by switching from DDT to other less effective and more expensive pesticides.
You can justifiably knock me for the mistake on the WHO. You got me th
Re: (Score:2)
Could as well work in reverse... (Score:2)
Poor people need to visit hospital more often, as their health is worse. And where better to frack than among poor people, whose political representatives don't give a crap about their welfare?
bad paper (Score:1)
What I'd like to see but can't seem to find in the paper: that hospital admissions INCREASED in zip codes where fracking came in, more so than in those without, around and after the time fracking started. The evidence given, however, appears to be that hospital admissions
Causation (Score:1)
Re: Happy Fag Marriage! Nope! (Score:2, Informative)
Failtroll. Diesel doesn't light on fire like that.
Re: (Score:2)
If anyone would ever bother, the statisticians could also determine that living in a city that is controlled by democrats correlates with a greater likelihood of being robbed. Also I suppose you could do a study showing living next to black people likely correlates to being a victim of a serious crime. Of coarse you can not actually publish such a study because it's entire premise is politically incorrect and racist. You can however publish a study saying that living next to a fracking site will send you to the hospital
Science at it's best.
Actually, you can publish those studies, but the difference is the press would not embrace them and push them mindlessly.