July 20, 2023

Briefly

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  • Substack counts as the media, right?  David Farrier, a NZ journalist and filmmaker, wrote about getting a spine MRI.
  • Aspartame is now in Group IIb on the International Agency for Cancer Research scale of hazards.  We had reports from at least the Herald, Stuff, 1News, RNZ.  It’s important to remember that IIb, “possible carcinogen” is effectively the lowest on a three-point scale. IARC has  Group I (definitely carcinogenic at some dose),  Group IIb (probably carcinogenic at some dose), and Group IIb (possibly carcinogenic at some dose). They also have Group III (insufficient evidence). They once had Group IV (not carcinogenic) but it only ever got used once and was retired.  The “at some dose” proviso is also important; for example, sunlight is a Group I carcinogen.  The reports were all pretty good — much better than when bacon got into Group I several years ago.  Perhaps the best was at Stuff, where they actually quoted the recommended dose limit: David Spiegelhalter, an emeritus statistics professor at Cambridge University, said the guidance means that “average people are safe to drink up to 14 cans of diet drink a day … and even this ‘acceptable daily limit’ has a large built-in safety factor.” That’s safe for cancer, not for all possible problems, but it’s still a lot.  I’d also link to the Twitter thread by Martyn Plummer, a statistician and former IARC researcher, but linking to Twitter threads now doesn’t work because of the War on Twitter.
  • Katie Kenny at Stuff had an excellent story about measurement accuracy and her infant son’s weight.
  • Mediawatch writes about one weird trick for getting your press releases covered in the news (be sure always to call it research)
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »