The Epidemiologists: Have They Got Scares for You! [Paperback]

For the first time, Brignell shows exactly how, when and why it happened. He presents not just examples, not just the typical dodges of the trade, but an integrated historical account of the rise and fall of epidemiology, and its huge impact on the intellectual world we inhabit.

The explanation starts on the cover. A clown leads a horse-float bearing the banner "P<0.05". Storming the float are a gaggle of beaming white-coated geeks, each brandishing his own banner: salt is poison, soy beats Alzheimer's, night shifts cause cancer etc. They have trampled the brass band and stopped the float, but the clown smiles fatuously on, unaware that his machine is kaput.

Brignell's message is that the statistical apparatus developed by Ronald Fisher and his successors for the identification of risks and benefits has been prostituted to produce trumped up cures and scares.

No previous book has so clearly identified the intellectual and social origins of the fall of epidemiology. Brignell gives exact references and dates. He identifies the stages by which the mathematical tools of correlation and significance were torn apart from the rational requirement to demonstrate cause and mechanism.

Many of today's science and health "stories" defy common sense. But the endless river of nonsense in the media about food scares, fad diets, quack cures, radiation, pesticides and the rest have reduced the so-called educated population to superstitious credulity. Even worse, feedback mechanisms operating through political and funding systems are distorting science itself. Brignell provides chilling, documentary evidence of the deliberate watering down of scientific criteria at the highest levels of the medical establishment.

This book will make you think, even if you feel you already know the territory.