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September 24, 2007
West Nile
Mosquito borne illnesses are likely to be a major issue in the US, as malaria continues to be worldwide. But West Nile has not proven to be the plague that was predicted when it first hit the human population.
The CDC figures so far this year show a jump over the last month, which appears news-worthy. But overall this year, there have only been 49 deaths from West Nile, and less than 600 cases of neuroinvasive disease. Likely, many more people than are reported do develop the infection and immunity.
And how many people are killed trying to kill mosquitoes? I have nearly wrecked on more than one occasion trying to swat one. And DEET is a toxin, especially to children.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 02:43 PM | Comments (4)
September 06, 2007
biostatistics
Yesterday's JAMA (Vol 298, No. 9, pp. 1010-22) had an interesting study on the lack of knowledge and understanding of biostatistics and results among medical residents. (One can only assume that surgery residents were not included for some favorable reason.)
Though 95% believed that these concepts were important, only a quarter had reasonable confidence in their understanding, and even that confidence was overestimated.
Of course the authors opine the need for more effective training in biostatistics. But like the studies of which this study studied the study, the real question is not statistical significance but meaningful significance. If these medicine residents can become effective clinicians without understanding statistical significance as well as they have been taught to think they should, perhaps statistical significance is less significant than meaningful significance. In other words, doctors in training realize that real effectiveness is not learned from the numbers but from practice with real patients, who are statistically underrepresented in studies.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)