I'm not really sure why they are appealing - there doesn't seem to be much
doubt that the clean-up was poorly executed, and the council were
negligent. And the court case only ruled that the council were negligent
and gave the claimants the right to try and prove a link between the
contamination and the birth defects.
What the council should be doing and spending money on, in my opinion, is
trying to build a case to defend itself - i.e. to show there is no provable
link between the contamination and the birth defects. As I said in my
earlier postings on the subject, the incidence rate of the LRDs (limb
reduction defects) is not significantly higher (for 95% confidence) than
the rate elsewhere. The judge seemed to have intentionally overlooked the
fact that the reported p value (for significance) showed that there was no
statistically significant difference in number of cases at Corby compared
with the wider health area, except in one very small timeframe - but then
it's easy to select a timeframe where something occurs with greater
frequency in one area compared with another area, and then report a
significant difference. If I toss a coin once every 10 seconds for 10
minutes (60 coin tosses in all), over that period of 10 minutes there is
probably not going to be a significant difference between number of heads
and number of tails. But there may be a period of 30 seconds within that
timeframe when I toss 3 consecutive tails, and no heads. Would it be right
to home in on that 30 second period and use the fact that tails occurred
with much higher frequency than heads to then say that there is much
greater risk of the coin falling tails during the whole 10 minute
timeframe? This is effectively what the judge has done in the Corby
hearing. And this is what Corby DC need to consider in its defence.
What the claimants need to do is concentrate on proving a link between the
contamination and the LRDs. The fact that Corby DC has been found negligent
and made a mess, and the fact that there are cases of LRDs in the Corby
area, does not prove that the contaminated soil is the cause.
Pete Millis
Centre for Environmental Research
School of Life Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QJ
and
Rottingdean Garden and Landscape Services Ltd
Old School House
Telscombe Village
Nr. Lewes
BN7 3HY
--On 21 August 2009 15:32 +0100 Marie Mitchinson
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/8210753.stm
>
> FYI guys, Friday afternoon discussion.....
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