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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rande Is who wrote (13058)	10/1/1999 4:49:00 PM
From: Tummus1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57584

"but place a marker on the map showing the location and proximity to TMI of those that WERE taken ill. . . and I would suspect the pattern would not be random, but would lean closer to the TMI plant." Unfortunately that is fallacious reasoning: First, the epidemiologists would have taken that in to account. They are proffessional and know what they are doing. Second, decreasing the sample size would seriously skew the data. Flip a coin 100 times and it will come up rougly 50/50 heads or tail +/- a few percentage points. You can then conclude that tossing a coin will give you even odds of comming up heads or tails. Flip it 5 times and you may come up 4 heads and 1 tail. You can not conclude from that sample size that coins will come up heads 80% of the time. By the same token a small number of people right up next to TMI would give inaccurate results: a few cancer cases would have an inordinate impact on your results. By the same token you may (because of the small sample size) find no cancer cases. WOuld your conclusion be that living next to TMI will protect you from cancer? And besides if only a small number of people near the plant are affected then this would undercut the premise that this was a large scale disaster but rather a more contained industrial accident of the type which happen everyday. ie chemical plant fires, fireworks warehouses exploding etc. Third, the issue is moot. The amount of radioactivity that was released in to the enironment was negligeble. As I said about 1 millirem. Normal background (cosmic radiation and radiation from elements in rocks and soil) is about 125 millirem per year. This means that that the community was exposed to less than 1% of their yearly dose. To put this into perspective if you move to high altitude location like Denver where the atmosphere is thinner and more cosmic radiation is allowed through then the background dose goes to five 500+ millirem/year. I have yet to meet anybody in Denver complaining about high radiation risk TW