Experimental Determination of Excess Lung Cancers in Pulp Mill School Districts in BC Canada. Sept 1990 Jorma Jyrkkanen

Experimental Determination of Excess Lung Cancers in Pulp Mill School Districts in BC Canada

Experimental Determination of Excess Lung Cancers in Pulp Mill School Districts in BC Canada

By: Jorma Jyrkkanen. Sept 1990.

I addressed the simple null (Ho) hypothesis that living in a pulp mill town would have no impact on the incidence of lung cancer (LC) mortality. The research hypothesis (Hi) is that yes there is an effect air pollutants and that it would be elevated.

Major assumptions are that the populations being drawn upon are similar in demographics and life-styles, that sampling is random, and that there are no other major sources of lung carcinogens. These assumptions are unexplored and should be examined in greater depth if one wishes to improve certitude and to narrow down causal factors. For example, do mills prefer to hire smokers to screen lung disease liability and shorten pension payouts? If so then this simple act could account for more lung cancers. That was outside the scope of my investigation.

I therefore decided to use the parametric Students t-test with alpha=.05 (the risk that chance alone could cause the observed effect in 5% of cases) and a 1-tailed, unequal sample size model. Data (Tables 1, 2) were obtained from Gallagher et. al. 1986. Occupational mortality in BC.. Health and Welfare Canada. BC Research.

Table 1. LC DEATHS AMONG MALES AND FEMALES AMONG TOTAL DEATHS WHERE THERE ARE NO PULP MILLS IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT, N=13



Table 2. LC DEATHS WITH PULP MILLS IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT, N=9



Table 3. Statistical comparisons of percentage Lung Cancer mortality between mill school districts and non-mill school districts for males.



The results of the Student’s-t test appear in Table 4 below.
Table 4. Results of Student’s-t test. Students t-test assuming Var1=Var2



Conclusion

Since the calculated t=1.88771 falls within the region of rejection, exceeding the critical tabular value t<=1.734063 (Table 4), the null hypothesis must be rejected, that is Ho is rejected and therefore the research hypothesis (Hi) must be accepted, implying that there is an elevated lung cancer mortality amongst males in the Mill school districts (.025<P<.05). To conclude, the Mill districts exhibited statistically significantly higher lung cancers in males (4.81% Lung Cancer mortality) compared to No Mill districts (3.95%LC mort) (P(T<=t), one-tailed = 0.037648). This test alone is not proof however of causality but is suggestive. This is especially so when considered along with the other evidence I have examined such as P53 gene mutations found with bisulfite ion pollution and its link to lung cancer. When the analysis was conducted for females, the same pattern was found for females though the magnitude of the effect was about half. Warning! When I did a similar cursory analysis for BONE CANCER, I found that it was very highly linked to pulp mill school districts. this anomaly should be investigated for specific causal agent. Copyright 1990 Jorma Jyrkkanen. All rights reserved. Article in Jorma's News.

Tags: bisulfite, bone, british columbia, cancer, cancer genes, health, jorma jyrkkanen, pollution cancer, science