It’s easy to forget sometimes that our scientists aren’t stupid. Unfortunately, their work is often reported to us by people who have no clue about science, casting their efforts in a ludicrious light. Case in point, the lead paragraph from this article in The Telegraph:
Women who never sunbath during the summer are twice as likely to die than those who sunbathe everyday, a major study has shown.
Now, I could be wrong here, but last I checked, pretty much everyone’s chances of dying are 100%. It’s kinda hard to get any worse. Unless Highlander was true after all!
Of course if you read a little deeper it becomes clear that they’re really talking about their test population during the period of the study. If maybe 3% of the women studied died during the duration of the study, evidently two of them would be non-sun-bathers, and one would. (They studied nearly 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years, during which time 2545 of them died.) It appears, however, that they included all causes of death.
Fortunately there are scientists consulted for the article who maintain a healthy skepticism about just how far you can trust the implications of the study, which is very little. It does seem that some sun exposure is better than no sun exposure, but there are other factors involved that should be explored and accounted for before we all start becoming sun-worshippers.
It’s articles like this that keep me skeptical of science reporting in general.