> excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents.
That's a pretty big exclusion. It's not as if pollution gives a damn about political boundaries.
That's a pretty big exclusion. It's not as if pollution gives a damn about political boundaries.
so why insist on only counting local diagnoses?
EDIT: perhaps there are regulations that mandate doctors to diagnose similar percentages, to prevent overdiagnosis... and perhaps this is being weaponized against discovering localized exposure to carcinogens?
Charitably, I guess the researchers just don't have resources to locate patients more accurately than by their diagnosing hospitals location. It's a huge amount of noise on top of patients actual location history, which would seem to make their survey only capable of detecting persistent hotspots that span the location of many hospitals.
Either it's on the cancer cluster question, but then you contact and ascertain the accurate patient location history.
Or the data never was on the cancer cluster question...