From The Metro:
Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, told MPs that the number of alcohol-induced deaths was up to five times the official figure of 8,000.
Why stop there, you twat? Why not say "up to ten times" or "up to a hundred times"? Has it ever crossed your mind that the true figure might be, er, "less than" the official figure (you'd expect any 'official' figure to be in the mid-range of possible estimates), which is itself prone to being revised upwards by a factor of four, of course.
Friday 24 April 2009
Made-up statistic of the week
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6 comments:
Okay, so the President of the Royal College of Surgeons claims that the real figure is five times higher than 8,000.
Which means he claims that 32,000 deaths went unnoticed or misdiagnosed on his watch. He claims that his doctors get the diagnosis right once in every five times.
Hardly something to brag about, I'd have thought.
Prhaps it depends what's meant by "alcohol induced"
Close enough for government work Mr Leg-Iron.
With a reported 72,000 iatrogenic (medical mistakes) deaths every year hospital is the very last place you want to be when you are ill.
Doctors bury their mistakes alright. I just didn't imagine they needed a night-shift to get the work completed on schedule...
Oddly enough, doctors in a third world country (India, I think), went on strike and the death rate plummeted. They soon got it back to normal when they all clocked in again.
Oh, and Ian Gilmore is a twat.
There, I've said it.
A number plucked out of the air just as a unit of alcohol was and the number that you should drink as a maximum. All plucked out of the ether. Funny how the American unit is twice as big. It's not that all Americans are twice as big as us or have livers twice as efficient. I really, really hate pretend science.
He certainly seems to have made no attempt to justify it. Indeed the article later says 2.9 milliom people are "dependent on alcohol", which at 40,000 a year means that if every single one of them died of alcoholism rather than ANYTHING else average lide expectancy would be 58. (OK I am greatly simplifying but it is clearly a made up claim, useful for a grant from a fakecharity.
NC, good point. But I make it 2.9 million (itself a made up figure, presumably) divided by 40,000 = 72.5, let's assume people start drinking at age 15, that gives an average life expectancy of 87.5 years. Hmm.
The beauty of your approach is that once they start inflating the number of 'alcohol dependent' to let's say five million, that'd give us an average life expectancy of 140 years!
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