Page 307 - English for Writing Research Papers

Chapter 17

Results

Factoids: Misleading results?

1796: Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, creates homeopathy as a sys-
tem of alternative medicine. There has never been any conclusive scientifi c
evidence that it works other than as a placebo.

1945: Scientists warn that fluoride in drinking water is poisonous and many

local governments around the world ban it. However in low concentrations
(one part-per-million) flouride reduces dental decay.

1962: Rachel Carson, a US marine biologist, forecasts that birds will die out
and humans will contract cancer due to increasing exposure to the insecticide
DDT. No plausible biological mechanism was identified and research failed to

support the claims. DDT was nevertheless banned and millions may have died
unnecessarily from malaria.

1968: Paul Ehrlich, US ecologist and demographer, publishes his book The
Population Bomb , where he writes: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over. In the
1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are
going to starve to death’.

1979: A small epidemiological study reports an association between hypoth-

esised exposure to electromagnetic fields and childhood leukaemia. Thousands
of studies have failed to establish a link between actual exposure and any
health effect.

1996: Scientists speculate that a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)
might be contracted from eating beef from cattle with BSE, and forecast that
the disease would kill 10 million people by 2010. This led to the slaughter of
8 million cattle in Britain.

2005: David Nabarro, Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian

and Human Influenza, warns that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill
anywhere between 5 million and 150 million people.
2015: Data apparently shows that the ‘vanishing’ of polar ice is not the result
of runaway global warming.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 295
A. Wallwork, English for Writing Research Papers,
English for Academic Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5_17