The epidemiologists – Have they got the scares for you! By John Brignell, Brignell and Associates, Great Britain, 2004.

Hot of the press, this latest book by John Brignell outing the charlatans amongst us is most disturbing. Disturbing because what I, and I suppose most of us, read in the newspapers and assume to be accurate, is anything but - the amount of rank bull dust masquerading as scientific fact published by the media is astonishing.

John Brignell retired early from his Professorship of Industrial Instrumentation at the University of Southampton to write about the abuses of measurement – leading to his first book – Sorry – wrong number! Published in 2000.  Since then he has set up his website “www.numberwatch.co.uk” where hapless individuals and organisations are roundly castigated for various numerical crimes.  I inadvertently scored a hit there too – which arose from a misunderstanding of how we in the mining industry compute statistics – but it did lead to a very succinct analysis of global warming statistics and another demonstration that global warming is a sham.

But back to this book – as the title suggests, it has something to do with epidemics and hence the medical profession and the health-care industry. The book starts off with a good start by repeating two newspaper headlines in the UK – The Independent , June 5 2001 - “Pets double children's risk of asthma attacks” and the from the BBC a few days earlier “Keeping pets prevents allergies”.

Assuming that the both The Independent and the BBC got their information from the same source, how could such contradictory statements be published? Or how about “Pain killers prevent cancer”, yet at another time “Regular pain killer use linked to cancer”.  Clearly the newspapers are obviously quoting scientific studies, perhaps it was because scientists were contradicting each other, or is it.

Damning as it is, Brignell sums it up nicely by writing that “science, ..had revolutionised human life and tripled life-span, ..was now reduced to the status of necromancy or astrology.  Brignell's expertise was in avionic instrumentation and from what one reads, it was the published baloney in his daily morning newspaper which prompted his first opus - “Sorry, wrong number”.  Having finished that area of science, he then discovers another branch of science that also seemed to have degenerated into a corrupt travesty – epidemiology – the science of epidemics.

What concerned him more than anything was how the very people who sought to introduce scientific rigour into the science of epidemiology inadvertently provided the means of its corruption.  In order to do that, of course, one needs to go back into history and discover how it all began, and when and why it started to go wrong, and who the villains were.  Epidemiologists are not always the bad guy, it seems, and to find that out, you will of course have to buy the book.

The early chapters deal with the early history of epidemiology, the terrible epidemics which plagued humanity. Then follows the discovery of what actually caused disease, and importantly a summary of one of the pioneers of statistics, and the irony of his legacy.  The came Social Theory – which turned scientific medicine upside down and changed the world.

The second half of the book deals with the overwhelming amount of material available to us on almost every imaginable topic of medicine. Of course the author also shows how the present situation came about, looking at the tools of the trade and the fallacies. And of course nothing like picking the bones of a few pertinent examples.

Inside the cover, or at least on page ii of the flyleaf we find a Time Chart of disease – starting from 2000 BC to today, and covering everything in between. How, one would think, could all this be covered in such a slim volume of some 200 pages? Well fortunately Brignell doesn't, but he does focus on the essentials and some pertinent real case histories.

Most importantly he does spend some time on Social Theory – and don't make the mistake I made by looking up a dictionary – my Chambers does not have an entry for it, and googling on the Internet doesn't yield anything precise either. And that is precisely the problem – what on earth is Social Theory?  Having suffered the requirement myself in my undergraduate days to do one or two “humanities” subjects, I guess Social Theory had to have its origins in that part of Academia, and as Brignell puts it “The study of kings and queens had been largely replaced by the study of the masses, Social History,..”.  Just this little instance of the difficulty to get a precise meaning of Social Theory starts to explain what has happened over time.

Brignell points to one individual Thomas McKeown who wrote two influential books, “The role of Medicine” and "The Origins of Human Disease”.  It seems that McKeown accidentally became Professor of Social Medicine, as the result of some funding of a Trust which wanted a specific chair of Social Medicine.  The best way of showing what then happened was the disease of Tuberculosis (TB) – which if I read Brignell right, was regarded by McKeown as a disease of poverty, being one of infectious type, while those of affluence were non-infectious diseases. Personally this categorisation of disease is a load of nonsense, which Brignell then expertly shows to be so in the rest of his chapter on Social Science.  (Social Theory can be thought of as one of the most influential philosophical developments in human history bequeathing us the Nanny State and the environmental quangos).

Usually diseases are caused by something, and Brignell rightly uses the furphy of cigarette smoking causing lung-cancer as his next demolition job.  My late father, a physician and surgeon, always maintained that individuals who developed cancer of the lung, also tended smoke cigarettes, and that the cigarette smoking was a symptom, and not the cause of lung-cancer.

Other chapters discuss statistics, in a highly readable form, then a brief description of the tools of the trade, essential knowledge to unravel the pronouncements of science published in the mass-media,  while the chapters Body parts, Substance Abuse, Tobacco Road, and Cancer are pretty obvious what they deal with.

The Chapter Holocaust was another matter – and what, I thought, has this well known WWII event to do with the subject of his book – and of course it wasn't what you think it was, it was actually Foot and Mouth Disease in the UK and how the Brits managed to completely stuff it up – veritably a holocaust of the intelligence type.  They and they alone, with their stupid scientific advisors decided to cull all the culprits, with the equally culpable epitome of bureaucracies, the European Commission.

A rather interesting observation was made on page 96 when the author discusses SIP's Single-Issue-Parties where groups of fanatics form political parties. This is usually a non event except in societies in which proportional representation operates, and then indeed we are politically affected by these minority fanatics.  The Greens, for example, managed to gain a virtual monopoly of the environment ministries of Europe and forced environmentalism onto those hapless Europeans.  As the Ice age doom theory literally froze in the middle 1960's, the Greens then reversed direction and starting screaming the opposite – global warming.

“The ease with which a specious theory such as global warming can be imposed on the world constitutes a textbook example of political chicanery”. And once a theory reaches a critical mass of acceptance, no matter how stupid or scientifically specious, it becomes established fact.

The rest of John Brignell writes about means you have to buy the book from his website but I can assure it was a riveting read – I finished it in two nights in bed.

This book is a welcome relief for the usual pseudo-science we are deluged with in the media. It is an excellent source of fact, and lists and explains important concepts so that anyone can separate the wheat from the chaff in their daily newspaper.

All in all a significant contribution to the demolition of quacks, charlatans and junk-science.