Mangano Fallacies

This post is a carry-over from the comment section associated with an op-ed on the blue fin tuna from the Forbes' website.

One commenter had posted that all the criticisms of Mangano had come from the nuclear industry.  That itself is a logical fallacy.  It's okay to be skeptical of what someone from the industry states, but unless you have evidence that the person has lied many times before (as in you KNOW she/he did, not you think so), then that person's claims should be fairly weighed against Mangano's.  Also the "industry" is composed of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.  In any large group of people there will be some bad folks and some good folks.  One shouldn't stereotype.

In any event, here is a link from the non-nuclear industry publication Scientific American properly criticizing his most recent "work".


When contacted by MedPage, which also isn't a part of the nuclear industry, he said:

"There are probably a variety of factors that could be linked to this excess of 14,000 deaths," he said. "But it does raise a red flag."

Yes, there probably are a variety of factors.  And no it doesn't raise a red flag, because spikes come and go regardless of nuclear accidents.  There is no known underlying biological mechanism  for very low doses of radiation to cause infant deaths.  This is analogous to the old days of Salem, MA when someone would give someone else the "evil eye", and then when something bad eventually happened to the person who received the "eye" (became ill, house caught fire, slipped and fell, etc.), the person who gave the "evil eye" was labeled as a witch.  That's of course nonsense...so is the connection between a nuclear accident and an eventual spike in infant mortality (low birth weights, accidents, SIDS, congenital malformations, etc.).

So, if we look for example at an early paragraph in that particular paper, we find:


"Shortly after the report was issued, officials from British Columbia, Canada,
proximate to the northwestern United States, announced that 21 residents had
died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in the first half of 2011, compared
with 16 SIDS deaths in all of the prior year. Moreover, the number of deaths
from SIDS rose from 1 to 10 in the months of March, April, May, and June 2011,
after Fukushima fallout arrived, compared with the same period in 2010 (2).
While officials could not offer any explanation for the abrupt increase, it coincides
with our findings in the Pacific Northwest."

Okay...how does radioactivity cause SIDS?  It's the "evil eye" causes illness effect.

At least there was a bit of honesty with the next sentence:

"Any comparison of potential effects of radiation exposure must attempt to
examine the dose-response relationship of the exposure of a population."

MUST, MUST, MUST....YES, YES, YES, but did they do that?  NO, NO, NO.

I could go on and on with details with this particular "study" but on a broader perspective related to all of his "studies"...


What a good epidemiologist does, is do epidemiology, not just wait for a nuclear accident, and then wait for a spike and tie the two together.  Mangano needs to look at the actual causes of deaths, estimate the radiation doses actually received by the infants from the accident, identify possible confounders, etc.  Instead he intentionally engages in the ecological fallacy, and intentionally avoids the fundamental Bradford-Hill criteria, which every epidemiologist is familiar with.

But even if there was some radiation phenomenon no one knows about, we can do a quick reality check.  Let's look at U.S. natural radioactivity levels and look at infant mortality rates.  If radiation is a strong factor in infant mortality, where the exposure is continuous, it's fairly uniform, and we can look at many data sets what do we get?  I'll just focus on what CDC calls the Mountain Region (high natural radiation) and the West Central Region (low natural radiation).  Let's just look at the last report for now, you can pick any dates you want..and we get the Mountain Region at 59 and the W.C. Region at 66.  Now that's anecdotal and also involves the ecological fallacy, but if radiation was a strong factor we expect the opposite by a lot!

Note that that study was published in The International Journal of Health Services.  That is not a health physics, epidemiology, or medical scientific journal.  That journal was chosen for a reason.   The reason is  that to the extent any peer review is done, it won't be done by people with strong epidemiology backgrounds.  Health services deals with legal, political and management issues in health care.  So rather than share this "important finding" with other experts in the field, he intentionally avoids them.

But once published somewhere, he can broadcast press releases and use phrases like "peer reviewed" and "health journal", which is really what he wants in order to fool people into thinking he's surpassed some kind of intellectual threshold, when he actually avoided it.  It's all about garnering public attention to his anti-nuclear agenda., not science.

Which is why when one looks at Mangano's website, it's full of links to coverage by the general media.

But notice there are no links associated with any of his "studies"to the American Pediatric Association, the American Medical Association, the Health Physics Society, the American Epidemiological Society,  or even the Centers For Disease Control & Prevention (from which the data from his last "work" originated)!

Is there a grand conspiracy against Mangano by this diverse array of employed professionals or is Mangano (who is seeking YOUR DONATION)  a con man?

(If you can't answer in favor of the latter by now, you might want to review the psychological phenomena known collectively as cognitive bias.)