{"id":33377,"date":"2015-10-28T05:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T09:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33377"},"modified":"2015-10-28T11:32:14","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T15:32:14","slug":"the-whos-lack-of-clarity-leads-to-sensationalist-newspaper-headlines-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/28\/the-whos-lack-of-clarity-leads-to-sensationalist-newspaper-headlines-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The WHO’s lack of clarity leads to sensationalist newspaper headlines (again)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World Health Organization appears to exist primarily to give newspaper editors the excuse to run senational headlines about the risk of cancer. This is not a repeat story from earlier years. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Here’s The Atlantic<\/em>‘s Ed Yong<\/a> to de-sensationalize the recent scary headlines:<\/p>\n

The International Agency of Research into Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, is notable for two things. First, they\u2019re meant to carefully assess whether things cause cancer, from pesticides to sunlight, and to provide the definitive word on those possible risks.<\/p>\n

Second, they are terrible<\/em> at communicating their findings.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Group 1 is billed as \u201ccarcinogenic to humans,\u201d which means that we can be fairly sure that the things here have the potential<\/em> to cause cancer. But the stark language, with no mention of risks or odds or any remotely conditional, invites people to assume that if they specifically partake of, say, smoking or processed meat, they will definitely get cancer.<\/p>\n

Similarly, when Group 2A is described as \u201cprobably carcinogenic to humans,\u201d it roughly translates to \u201cthere\u2019s some<\/em> evidence that these things could cause cancer, but we can\u2019t be sure.\u201d Again, the word \u201cprobably\u201d conjures up the specter of individual risk, but the classification isn\u2019t about individuals at all.<\/p>\n

Group 2B, \u201cpossibly carcinogenic to humans,\u201d may be the most confusing one of all. What does \u201cpossibly\u201d even mean? Proving a negative is incredibly difficult, which is why Group 4 \u2014 \u201cprobably not<\/em> carcinogenic to humans\u201d \u2014 contains just one substance of the hundreds that IARC has assessed.<\/p>\n

So, in practice, 2B becomes a giant dumping ground for all the risk factors that IARC has considered, and could neither confirm nor fully discount as carcinogens. Which is to say: most things. It\u2019s a bloated category, essentially one big epidemiological shruggie. But try telling someone unfamiliar with this that, say, power lines are \u201cpossibly carcinogenic\u201d and see what they take away from that.<\/p>\n

Worse still, the practice of lumping risk factors into categories without accompanying description \u2014 or, preferably, visualization<\/a> \u2014 of their respective risks practically invites people to view them as like-for-like. And that inevitably led to misleading headlines like this one in the Guardian<\/em><\/a>: \u201cProcessed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes \u2013 WHO.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World Health Organization appears to exist primarily to give newspaper editors the excuse to run senational headlines about the risk of cancer. This is not a repeat story from earlier years. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Here’s The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong to de-sensationalize the recent scary headlines: The International Agency of Research into Cancer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,28,16],"tags":[39,213,51,244,290,537],"class_list":["post-33377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-media","category-science","tag-junkscience","tag-newspapers","tag-pr","tag-publichealth","tag-statistics","tag-who"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Gl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33378,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33377\/revisions\/33378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}