Epidemiological interviews can exhaustively catalog confounders while missing the suspected exposure.
Evidence
Donna Robbins got a visit from two researchers working on the CDC investigation one evening in July 1980, seven months after John Truman’s call to Clark Heath. The researchers asked Donna about the medical histories of everyone in the family, how often they had been exposed to X rays, how many pregnancies and miscarriages she’d had. They asked about her and her ex-husband’s jobs, their ethnic and religious backgrounds, their church and community activities, their eating habits, hobbies, and household pets. Did she keep a garden? Had she or her sons ever fished or waded in Woburn lakes and streams? Had she ever smoked cigarettes? Painted her apartment? Used hair spray or hair dye? Traveled outside Woburn? The entire process took nearly two hours. Donna answered as best she could. After the researchers left, she realized that they had never asked her about the tap water. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 169
Categorization
- SEED: An essay on how official investigations build elaborate questionnaires around hypotheses that quietly omit the one variable the complainants already named.
- DEEPTHINKING: The two-hour instrument designed to rule out everything except the water turns out never to mention the water — a compact parable about how institutional inquiry encodes its own blind spots.
- XREF: connects to: Industry scientists discredited epidemiology as too crude to prove harm; Hunting through multidimensional data produces spurious significant findings. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 602
Broader Connections
- Industry scientists discredited epidemiology as too crude to prove harm
#corroborates(0.75) - Hunting through multidimensional data produces spurious significant findings.
#complicates(0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 602