From RedOrbit comes this scary report:
MAN'S best friend may be woman's biggest enemy after a study yesterday suggested dogs may be a cause of breast cancer.The shock report found women diagnosed with the disease were more than twice as likely to own a dog than other women of the same age.
If the theory is true it would go some way to explaining why breast cancer seems to affect more affluent women in Western society.
It is believed dogs pick up a virus from mice called the mouse mammary tumour virus which they get from constantly sniffing the ground.
A study by the University of Munich found 37 per cent of breast cancer sufferers owned a dog, compared with 15 per cent of women in general.
A further 16 per cent have owned a dog at some point in the last 10 years.
The team said previous studies identified MMTV as inducing breast cancer in mice - but with similar properties to human breast cancer.
Their report said: "This offers a possible explanation for the increased incidence of breast cancer in Western countries and its correlation with a higher living standard, as those who are less affluent are often unable to financially support a householdpet."
Folks, statistics can be manipulated ad nauseam to find for whatever you hope to prove. A common practice goes like this: Many people drive red cars. Cops give a majority of speeding tickets to people driving red cars. Conclusion: People who own red cars are bad drivers. An alternate answer -- not mentioned -- is that maybe the color of the car simply makes it stand out more and the cop concludes it was the red car that was pinging his radar.
Besides, everyone knows that dog ownership helps you live longer.
See, now, I feel bad. I thought Tarazet had been closed forever, yet I couldn't let it go, so I kept it on my blogroll. Today I came for a visit to hopefully read some old posts, and what do I find? NEW POSTS!
I should have listened to one of those little voices in my head that was telling me to come by here. But nooooooo, I had to listen to the ones telling me to search the internet for free music downloads.
Posted by: Jeff at June 21, 2006 12:27 PMTHINK of all the fun you'll have catching up on several months of posts!
Posted by: Jeff Soyer at June 21, 2006 12:49 PMI stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I was quite outraged by this supposed study about the link between dogs and breast cancer. Too often the press misinterprets the results of scientific studies and attribute purely correlational relationships to cause-and-effect relationships. Because most people don't know the difference, they think that the co-existence of two variables means that one must cause the other, which simply isn't true. Ever heard of coincidence?
Posted by: L. M. S at June 21, 2006 03:24 PMI thoroughly agree that most media accounts of the links between research variables is incorrectly presented. We have to remember that reporters are not scientists; they condense and sometimes unintentionally distort the information they are trying to convey, simply because of their lack of expertise in a given field.
Posted by: panasianbiz at June 21, 2006 03:30 PM