They gave the bansturbulary a bit of coverage on BBC News 24 yesterday, a certain Dr Chris Record went in to bat to complain that alcohol is "far too cheap and far too heavily promoted", which is nonsense on both counts but we knew he'd say that.
As a side issue, as far as I am aware, the word "epidemic" refers to infectious diseases and not self-inflicted stuff: if you sit near a heavy drinker or a fat person, you do not damage your liver or become fat yourself, so it is particularly galling when so-called medical experts claim that there is an "epidemic" of liver disease or obesity.
The BBC claim that in the North East of England, the number of young people who had to be treated for alcohol-induced liver disease had gone up by 400% in the last ten years and the back of the "surge in binge drinking among the young", although they gave no absolute figures. They did however give absolute figures for the whole of England - which don't appear to be in the article to which I linked above - which were as follows:
Alcoholic liver disease
People in their late 20s
2002/03 - 282
2009/10 - 479
Increase = 70%
People in their early 30s
2002 - 868
2010 - 1,395
Increase = 60%
I don't know why one table referred to "2002/03" and the other to "2002", that's just the way it was presented. Later on they claimed that we are drinking twice as much as in the 1950s but admitted that total consumption had fallen over the last ten years, and then caveated that by saying that there was more binge drinking by young people.
Ho hum.
How many people are there in England in their 'late 20s' or 'early 30s'? At least four million of each, let's say. So if 479 people out of four million suffer from XYZ, then that's 0.01% of them, and if 1,395 people suffer from XYZ that's 0.03% of them. Those percentages are so tiny as to be nigh meaningless, and a comparison between two nigh meaningless figures (the 2002 and the 2010 percentages) is simply not worth calculating.
And the smaller the sample size, the more likely you are to get large fluctuations of course, it just happened to be the North East, but no doubt they can track down a hospital somewhere where there were ten cases in 2010 but only one in 2002, in which case that's up 1,000%, or maybe no cases at all in 2002, in which case it's up infinity per cent.
Huw Edwards, a lucky man in many respects
5 hours ago
7 comments:
Brilliant bit of bansturbation on R4 recently: it was announced that one in ten bank notes have traces of cocaine on them and that this might be due to more people taking cocaine to stay awake now that drinking hours were longer.
So relaxing opening times is making us all class A drug addicts.
Only one in ten? In the US it's almost all of them!
In the olden days "he drank himself to an early grave" was said to be commonplace. We don't hear much about it these days despite the supposed surge in drunkeness.
B, Anon, I've also read that in Italy or Spain nearly every bank note has traces of cocaine on it. And, let's assume one-in-ten is correct, how does this compare to five years ago pre-smoking ban? Or to ten years ago when pub's had to close half an hour earlier than now, or whatever?
B, well, they want you to hear about it whether it happens or not, that's why they keep pumping out the propaganda to make us believe that young people are going back to the old ways.
Actually they did give the exact figures for the North East: "Balance's figures found 189 hospital admissions for 30 to 34-year-olds in 2010, compared with 37 in 2002."
"Hospital admissions", note: that does not mean 189 people since some will have been admitted more than once.
Here's what I think: Balance is funded by the local PCTs; local PCTs are about to be abolished; Balance wants to make sure its funding continues under the GP Consortium that will replace the PCT. Hence press release.
AC, ta.
I know somebody who is a sales rep for pharma companies and he told me that PCT's were abolished lock stock and barrel at the start of this year, they just disappeared and his contact list with hundreds of phone numbers and emails is now useless.
"they just disappeared and his contact list with hundreds of phone numbers and emails is now useless"
Yes, but what happened to the quangocrats? They can't have been made redundant, it just doesn't happen (quite apart from the fact that they were already redundant). Surely they are now being paid to do nothing in another organisation with a different name.
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