Harvard's Cancer Study Links Costco to 120,000 Deaths
Things That Apparently Cause Cancer
Researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health published studies claiming that living near nuclear power plants increases cancer rates. Using their methodology, critics replicated the analysis and found that the same method attributes over 120,000 annual cancer deaths to Costco, 83,782 to private colleges, and 944,769 to Major League Baseball fields. The results show the method is flawed because it mistakes proximity for actual radiation exposure.
The attributable number of deaths from this methodology is probably zero, but the attributable number of bad papers is at least four.
- Magi604
Every time I come across an article about cancer, I'm reminded of that website that catalogued all the things that The Daily Mail said either caused or prevented cancer.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200221175201/http://kill-or-cu...
Too bad it's down, but here's an archive of it.
- hatthew
Did I miss it, or do the authors not bother to explain how the original methodology is wrong? Do we just take their word for it?
- aljgz
I hoped to see a systematic explanation of what the correlations show. As long as we don't have a viable explanation, there is something interesting there to discover. It can be that the statistical analysis is fundamentally flawed. Pointing out a flaw that tricked several serious researchers is progress. If it was because of some other factor (let's assume there are many more elderly people living around those neighborhoods, can't think of a better example now).
- dekhn
Cancer risk associations studies are not normally described as "proving" anything. The article being criticized uses 'risk' and 'association'. There is a long history of argument around these sorts of studies, there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments. There was a massive court case by flight attendants, who have a higher rate of cancer than the regular population.
In reading the criticism, I noticed the authors keep using the term "prove" and they also keep trying to come up with mechanisms ("refueling of the plant"). Even the argument about plant worker exposure compared to people living far away doesn't completely work, because the plant workers are taking all sorts of precautions to minimize exposure to radiation, but there are still mechanisms where something could go out the cooling stacks and deliver something harmful downwind.
The biophysics of cancer causation is entirely nontrivial and looking for the actual sources of the cancer risk is challenging, and watching physics people argue with epidemiologists gets old quickly (my field is biophysics, and I've had a few physics people insist that non-ionizing radiation couldn't possibly cause cancer, "because it doesn't damage DNA". Unfortunately, that argument i […]
- verteu
> Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks.
Any details of the methodology? Is it possible some mistakes were made during this "trial and error"?
edit: Some aggregated data is available from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12929679/ , but far from enough to reproduce: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/es...