It’s like magic. Every time the road statistics throw up something favorable, the police immediately take credit. A record low January road toll has been lauded by police as a sign their road safety messages are getting through to New Zealanders. No – it is not a sign of anything other than random fluctuations. Don’t [...]

The UN committee on the rights of the child are concerned that we have insufficient rights for children in New Zealand. They imply that this is the cause of our “staggeringly high” infant mortality statistics. This would be impressive if we actually had high infant mortality stats, but we don’t. New Zealand’s infant mortality rate [...]

I suppose I will be getting visits from dozens of worried patients who have just read the Herald’s latest attempt to scare the willies out of you. Popular painkillers ‘lift stroke, heart risk’ Any headline like this, involving common drugs, causes plenty of panic. Many of my patients will simply stop taking these medicines and [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article. Just for a change of pace, here’s a bit of travel spam that’s been hijacked as a piece of vaccine propaganda. More Kiwis die on foreign soil Kiwi’s lax attitude to getting our travel jabs may be killing us. [...]

The only thing that saves the stupid headline below from joining my Spam Journalism collection is the fact that the article it heads is not trivial: Govt’s tough line on violence isn’t working – police Police say the Government’s policies to reduce violent crime have had little effect, as such offending is still on the [...]

Yes, I know it is almost impossible to fathom such depravity, but some pharmaceutical advertisers make unsubstantiated claims in medical journals! (/SARCASM OFF) Such is the conclusion of Ben Goldacre of the Guardian, writing on the Bad Science Blog. Goldacre is writing about a recent research article in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine “Are claims of [...]

The Guardian has an article from their resident marxist environmentalist, Fred Pearce, that has the cheek to slag off New Zealand as not being very green because of the UN report on our emissions record. Depressingly the NZPA repeats his drivel, instead of ignoring it as they should have done. Pearce quotes statistics from the [...]

I see that question time was filled with references to the UNDP Human Development Report on Human Mobility and Development and a book called The Spirit Level. No Right Turn and FrogBlog are also terribly excited about the report, as if inequality is the only thing that matters. They probably get this idea from the [...]

My previous post was designed to add some clarity to the issue of how John Key should respond to the massive “No” vote in the referendum. However, I note that there seems to be much confusion amongst politicians, the media and even in the blogosphere about the result. The Editorial in the Herald on Sunday ”Referenda [...]

Just in case you thought that we might have learned something from the 1975 Swine Flu debacle, where the vaccine killed more people than the flu itself, comes the news that Europe is “fast-tracking” the Swine Flu vaccine. “Fast-tracking” means that, when we give the vaccine, we won’t know the proper dose, any of the [...]