In article <[log in to unmask]>, Dr Roy Powell
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Hi Katie
>
>I just spotted your email among a myriad of mailbase messages that I hadn't
>read for a while. I get my email package to sort mailbase stuff from more
>urgent messages into a separate folder so that I can read it at "leisure".
>
>You have probably had an answer to this by now but if you haven't, the milk
>study is described by Gore and Altman, Collecting and Screening Data. In
>Statistics and Ethics in Medical Research. BMJ Publications (1988).
I too would be grateful for the full reference.
>
>The study was done in 1930 in schools in Lanarkshire and involved 20,000
>children: 10,000 given milk and 10,000 controls. Height and weight
>measurements were taken at the beginning of a six-month period starting in
>Winter and ending in Summer.
>
>The main feature of the study were that it was biased because
>1) randomisation broke down: teachers gave milk to poorer children. The two
>groups were not similar at the beginning of the study, the milk group having
>lower mean weight and height than the control group.
>2) the children were weighed with their clothes on at the start (Winter) and
>end of the study (Summer) which messed up any growth estimates.
>
>As a result, controls appeared to do no worse than children receiving milk.
>The impact of the study was that it encouraged Thatcher "the Milk Snatcher"
>as she was called at the time, to stop free school milk in the 70s.
Being nit picky, after 40 years? I doubt it. I also seem to recall
Professor Holland saying that Thatcher's snatchering was at least partly
helped by a study in which he was involved, showing that the major
nutritional problem of '70s UK schoolchildren was obesity.
--
Richard Keatinge
homepage http://www.keatinge.demon.co.uk
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