Posts by James Green
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This was the reasoning, IIRC, for the decision not to conduct Stage 3 trials.
It harks back further as well. (I didn't have time to add this to my post earlier.) Austin Bradford Hill's (co-discoverer of the smoking-lung cancer link, and reknowned epidemiologist) famous paper concludes that there are times for acting boldly. As summarised elsewhere his paper argued "Policy actions that appear to create a net benefit (on average, considering all costs and benefits) should be taken, even without statistical "proof" of an association, while actions that entail great costs should only be taken with sufficient certainty of substantial benefit". Also, in that same article, and of relevance to the PHARMAC discussion "The alternative to carrying out the policy analysis is to leave the weighing of costs and benefits to an unreliable post-science political process".
As to whether the substantial cost of MeNZB outweighs (it's yet to be firmly ascertained) benefit, I can't comment. But basically, the message is that sometimes action can be justified before statistical evidence is collected.
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Are you saying that the govt is in the business of committing more than $200 million without knowing the likelihood of success?
I don't know about $200 million, but I haven't seen any hard evidence that specific tenets of the road safety campaign work (sure the road toll is dropping, but as to whether the TV ads, for example, work, is unproven). Internationally, the DARE program has been shown to be spectacularly unsuccessful, but is heavily funded here and overseas.
Public health initiatives are innately a bit slippery. Much like the road toll, the number of lives saved is small relative to the exposed population, so any trial to prove efficacy would have to involve a very large portion of the population. There is also the fact that because it's a now issue, delaying it would miss the point of it.
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And there's no evidence that it has saved any lives. Of course, the Heath Ministry promised it would save dozens of lives even though it admitted there was no efficacy data on the vaccine.
The evidence as to whether it has saved lives is still a couple of years away. If you want to find out whether something works, you need to give it to them first, and then, like, wait a while.
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Also, the justice system operates on a innocent until proven guilty premise. However, I believe one of the reasons why suppression orders are generally frowned upon is so that where reasonable doubt exists, the public are still able to scrutinise the strength of the evidence for themselves. In this case, I'm not sure that anybody comes off particularly well.
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OK, I admit that I, like 36 jurors who - over three trials - heard all the evidence and who decided that a baton apparently wasn't involved, am wrong.
Uh, they didn't decide that it wasn't used. They decided that it wasn't proven beyond reasonable doubt. So they might ALL believe that the baton was used, but were only 70% sure. Or they might ALL believe it wasn't used. You can't tell.
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One specific thing that struck me in the article was the way the effectiveness data was expressed. Clearly and, I assume, accurately.
Yes. That was excellent. Not only do the numbers not look nearly as exciting as the relative percentages (50% being bandied round), but you realise just how many women would be taking it for no benefit. Cost/benefit analysis is pretty ugly, but $1.6million per life saved (plus not quite one other person suffering cardiac damage) is not the most compelling equation.
And on the other topic du jour, the weather's been pretty warm the last few days, apparently to the extent that I've been hearing of people "sweating like an assistant police commissioner" (with apologies to Marc Ellis).
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The barbecue I was enjoying (note to Wellingtonians - we have barbecues on summer nights in Auckland)
Just a pity it gets dark so freaking early. That, and the mosquitoes.
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I rather like one of the under-mentioned BZP stats is that 61% of BZP users smoke weed, and over 20% take E. So, er, if drugs are bad and all, and BZP is banned, whaddaya think the kids are going to do?
(And about a third of those hospitalised from BZP have taken illegal substances at the same time, and pretty much the rest of them are drunk). -
Man. Just not my day.
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Sorry, that should be the current obesity epidemic was a result of [b]no[/b] corporal punishment.