Oo-er!
We've had our fulsome chuckle at the recent claim that "a 40p minimum unit price - coupled with a ban on promotions - would cut the number of alcohol-related deaths by about 70 in its first year", not least because there were - allegedly - only "8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007" in the whole of the UK anyway, so such a reduction would be within any sensible margin of measuring error.
But fair do's. Now, remember that Scotland represents less then a tenth of the population of the UK as a whole, so we'd expect the number of "alcohol-related deaths" (however defined) in Scotland to be in the order of a thousand or so and any cut to be in the order of, er, half a dozen to a dozen.
To my flabberstonishgaspment, I now read in The Torygraph, h/t Health Minister Dick, that"SNP ministers have published an academic report which indicates the measure would cut hospital admissions and deaths by 3,600 a year."
OK. When I'm in charge, I'll announce that I will ban conker fights (are they still legal?), which will "reduce the number of bruised knuckles and deaths by 3,600 a year" and I'll ban schoolboy soccer matches, which will "reduce the number of hacked shins and deaths by 36,000 a year" just to see if anybody is actually paying attention.
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Epic Fail from the Fake Statistics Department.
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6 comments:
While I agree that 87.3% of statistics are made up on the spot the 3,600 does include hospital admissions .. .. .. .. the current annual total number of which is not reported .. .. ..
Never underestimate how vicious those schoolboy matches can be....
CFF, I think there are ten million NHS hospital admissions every year, so in Scotland that would be about one million, of which 3,600 is a princely 0.36%.
how much revenue will the minimum price raise?
now that is a bona fide stealth tax
This is nonsense. My Tio Pepe has gone up to over £10 and now I will have health problems because I'll need to drink the supermarket's own paint stripper in future.
Time they put the drunks in a cell instead of carting them off to the NHS.
Auch, don't get me going...
Cheers for the link.
The most offensive thing about these stats is that they are estimates, but will be ingrained as fact by the puritans and quoted ad nauseam however inaccurate they actually are. Simply because it's not possible to disprove an imaginary non-admission.
Just as it's impossible to disprove the ludicrous claim of seat belt laws saving 2,400 imaginary lives per year (well, it is possible just by referring to the stats, but by doing that you are classed as a crank ... for adherence to common sense and logic).
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