Stat of the Week Competition Winner: October 12 – 18 2013

Thank you for your nominations in last week’s Stat of the Week competition.

We’ve chosen Michael MacAskill’s nomination of the Christchurch Press article: “Luck of the Irish has sex-disease downside”.

“Irish migrant rebuild workers in Christchurch might or might not have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases than they did last year.

This story claims that there has been an increase in Irish workers in ChCh with sexually transmitted infections. It doesn’t adjust for the large increase in the total number of Irish workers in the city over the period. No figures are available for other nationalities, so we have no context to judge whether Irish are either over or even under-represented. An absolutely unqualified and uninformed (but sadly, recently re-elected) lay Health Board member is oddly enough asked to contribute his opinion. He prefixes them with the word “Statistically…” to give them more weight. He assumes that all Irish workers in ChCh are heterosexual males, and makes several causal leaps to blame local women for passing on infections.

And why exactly are we just talking about the Irish in the first place?”

There’s also a strong reaction in the comments on that article on Stuff, including someone threatening to complain to the Press Council.

Thanks for alerting us to this article Michael, and congratulations for being our Stat of the Week winner!