Lies, damn lies and statistics (From The Argus)

Lies, damn lies and statistics

11:51am Wednesday 24th March 2010

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By Alison Thomson - Great train blogger »

No doubt my fellow commuters spotted the story carried in so many dailies recently about infestations of bugs in train and bus carriages. I must be the only person who never caught sight of it, or indeed of any of the little critters that are said to outnumber us humans by about 100 to one on the train.

(I didn't spot it in either the Metro or the Evening Standard, the daily rags of choice for us commuters, and naively assumed they hadn’t run it — conscious as they were that should we travelling passengers discover we were sitting in the midst of a pestilent epidemic, it might cause instant panic. See link — they’re not that sensitive.)

So, it was reported that, besides the great unwashed, we’re also now apparently sharing our journey with:

Up to 1,000 cockroaches (behind lighting panels, ceiling panels & under the floor)

Up to 200 bedbugs (in seat fabric)

Up to 200 fleas

I stumbled across the story in the Guardian’s Bad Science column, where Ben Goldacre tried to get to the bottom of the figures, and revealed that the whole bug scare was just that, a scare.

Turns out Rentokil had just won a £200m, five-year contract with Transport for London, and how better to justify their work than by revealing how bad things are now, and how much better they will be once the super-pest men are brought in to clean up?

The company’s now had to apologise, after a protracted Twitter storm (see @bengoldacre Twitter feed), and point out that the figures were based not on actual research but on a theoretical model, which made assumptions based on ideal breeding conditions — an equal number of boy and girl bugs, constant temperatures, plenty of food (they’re probably not wrong on that one, now are they?) and no human feet to stamp on them — almost none of which is ever the case on the London-to-Brighton (right, commuters?).

It's cheap journalism — or churnalism, churning out press releases without questioning their content or even checking the source — and a reminder that we really shouldn't always believe what we read.

So if you’re reading this on your laptop as you whizz past Preston Park, first check out the links to back up what I'm saying, and then, I’d pick your feet up and tuck your trousers into your socks, just in case — those little blighters can get everywhere and you never know where they’ll turn up next.