Look at what they did here. After talking about dirty hands, they throw in this nugget:
"Worldwide, around 1.9 million people die from diarrhoea every year. In Britain, an estimated one in five has an episode of diarrhoea each year."
You see what he did there? He put together two unrelated sentences in a way that scares you. Let's break down the 1.9 million:
From a google search:
"Global deaths from diarrhoea of children aged less than five were estimated at 1.87 million"
"WHO African and South-East Asia regions combined contain 78% (1.46 million) of all diarrhoea deaths occurring among children in the developing world"
"In sanitary living conditions where there is ample food and a supply of clean water, an otherwise healthy patient usually recovers from viral infections in a few days. However, for ill or malnourished individuals diarrhea can lead to severe dehydration and can become life-threatening without treatment"
"In many cases of diarrhea, replacing lost fluid and salts is the only treatment needed."
You see what he did there? He took something common, threw in some death statistics, and made a horror story out of nothing.
That's not really how it works. The shitting part comes first, then afterwards, there's nothing really left, and anything you drink just comes flowing right out. They get parched and die of dehydration.
It's easier than dying of malaria. With malaria, you feel as cold as hell, but you're burning up. Then you go into a heat delirium, where you start having hallucinations, you start throwing up at the same time everyday, you can't move anymore, and you slip into death. A lot more people die of malaria than of diarhea. And malaria is a lot easier to cure.
1) Is sample size large enough to draw conclusions? They have people at bus stops, rail stop, people from the north. from London, etc but only 409 total? And not everyone agreed to have their hands swabbed, so is it possible that the "dirtier" hands from London just turned down the swabbing?
And these are people who may also have just come off the rail or bus from elsewhere. If they all touched some common thing on the way out of the vehicle, they could be otherwise clean people who just got swabbed after picking up pathogens.
Still, half the people is really high. They should redo the experiment and see if they reach the same conclusions.
I'm FROM the north of England, and I still don't think this has any relevance to HN. Besides, I'm left-handed, so that's a whole new handshaking ballgame.
If there is such a disparity, presumably that will show up in the health stats?
They mention a few viruses transmissable in this way, so if their numbers and their inferences stand up, we should see a huge difference in the number of cases (or speed of communication - I'm not sure which - I am not an epidemiologist) between the London and Newcastle?
If such a difference doesn't show up, either their methodology was bogus, their inferences wrong (these viruses can't be usefully transmitted in this way) or it doesn't matter because some other factor balances it (maybe greater exposure to these bugs causes a degree of resistance).
"Worldwide, around 1.9 million people die from diarrhoea every year. In Britain, an estimated one in five has an episode of diarrhoea each year."
You see what he did there? He put together two unrelated sentences in a way that scares you. Let's break down the 1.9 million:
From a google search:
"Global deaths from diarrhoea of children aged less than five were estimated at 1.87 million"
"WHO African and South-East Asia regions combined contain 78% (1.46 million) of all diarrhoea deaths occurring among children in the developing world"
"In sanitary living conditions where there is ample food and a supply of clean water, an otherwise healthy patient usually recovers from viral infections in a few days. However, for ill or malnourished individuals diarrhea can lead to severe dehydration and can become life-threatening without treatment"
"In many cases of diarrhea, replacing lost fluid and salts is the only treatment needed."
You see what he did there? He took something common, threw in some death statistics, and made a horror story out of nothing.