Take a look here for a bio of Brignell

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Brignell

Some of his claims are now supported (ie DDT) other not (second-hand 
smoke).

As Bignell himself states 'everyone is self-interested'..this equally 
applies to someone peddling self-published books on one topic (the 
misuse of statistics) as well as scientists, policy-makers, newspaper 
reporters...




Dennis Raphael wrote:
> Epidemiologists and charlatans  Date 19/06/2004
> 
> http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=2652
> 
> Review of a scarey book about quacks, charlatans and junk-science.
> By Louis Hissink  Email / Print
> 
> 
> The epidemiologists – Have they got the scares for you! By John Brignell,
> Brignell and Associates, Great Britain, 2004.
> 
> 
> 
> Hot of the press, this latest book by John Brignell outing the charlatans
> amongst us is most disturbing. Disturbing because what I, and I suppose
> most of us, read in the newspapers and assume to be accurate, is anything
> but - the amount of rank bull dust masquerading as scientific fact
> published by the media is astonishing.
> 
> 
> 
> John Brignell retired early from his Professorship of Industrial
> Instrumentation at the University of Southampton to write about the abuses
> of measurement – leading to his first book – Sorry – wrong number!
> Published in 2000.  Since then he has set up his website
> “www.numberwatch.co.uk” where hapless individuals and organisations are
> roundly castigated for various numerical crimes.  I inadvertently scored a
> hit there too – which arose from a misunderstanding of how we in the mining
> industry compute statistics – but it did lead to a very succinct analysis
> of global warming statistics and another demonstration that global warming
> is a sham.
> 
> 
> 
> But back to this book – as the title suggests, it has something to do with
> epidemics and hence the medical profession and the health-care industry.
> The book starts off with a good start by repeating two newspaper headlines
> in the UK – The Independent , June 5 2001 - “Pets double children's risk of
> asthma attacks” and the from the BBC a few days earlier “Keeping pets
> prevents allergies”.
> 
> 
> 
> Assuming that the both The Independent and the BBC got their information
> from the same source, how could such contradictory statements be published?
> Or how about “Pain killers prevent cancer”, yet at another time “Regular
> pain killer use linked to cancer”.  Clearly the newspapers are obviously
> quoting scientific studies, perhaps it was because scientists were
> contradicting each other, or is it.
> 
> 
> 
> Damning as it is, Brignell sums it up nicely by writing that “science,
> ..had revolutionised human life and tripled life-span, ..was now reduced to
> the status of necromancy or astrology.  Brignell's expertise was in avionic
> instrumentation and from what one reads, it was the published baloney in
> his daily morning newspaper which prompted his first opus - “Sorry, wrong
> number”.  Having finished that area of science, he then discovers another
> branch of science that also seemed to have degenerated into a corrupt
> travesty – epidemiology – the science of epidemics.
> 
> 
> 
> What concerned him more than anything was how the very people who sought to
> introduce scientific rigour into the science of epidemiology inadvertently
> provided the means of its corruption.  In order to do that, of course, one
> needs to go back into history and discover how it all began, and when and
> why it started to go wrong, and who the villains were.  Epidemiologists are
> not always the bad guy, it seems, and to find that out, you will of course
> have to buy the book.
> 
> 
> 
> The early chapters deal with the early history of epidemiology, the
> terrible epidemics which plagued humanity. Then follows the discovery of
> what actually caused disease, and importantly a summary of one of the
> pioneers of statistics, and the irony of his legacy.  The came Social
> Theory – which turned scientific medicine upside down and changed the
> world.
> 
> 
> 
> The second half of the book deals with the overwhelming amount of material
> available to us on almost every imaginable topic of medicine. Of course the
> author also shows how the present situation came about, looking at the
> tools of the trade and the fallacies. And of course nothing like picking
> the bones of a few pertinent examples.
> 
> 
> 
> Inside the cover, or at least on page ii of the flyleaf we find a Time
> Chart of disease – starting from 2000 BC to today, and covering everything
> in between. How, one would think, could all this be covered in such a slim
> volume of some 200 pages? Well fortunately Brignell doesn't, but he does
> focus on the essentials and some pertinent real case histories.
> 
> 
> 
> Most importantly he does spend some time on Social Theory – and don't make
> the mistake I made by looking up a dictionary – my Chambers does not have
> an entry for it, and googling on the Internet doesn't yield anything
> precise either. And that is precisely the problem – what on earth is Social
> Theory?  Having suffered the requirement myself in my undergraduate days to
> do one or two “humanities” subjects, I guess Social Theory had to have its
> origins in that part of Academia, and as Brignell puts it “The study of
> kings and queens had been largely replaced by the study of the masses,
> Social History,..”.  Just this little instance of the difficulty to get a
> precise meaning of Social Theory starts to explain what has happened over
> time.
> 
> 
> 
> Brignell points to one individual Thomas McKeown who wrote two influential
> books, “The role of Medicine” and "The Origins of Human Disease”.  It seems
> that McKeown accidentally became Professor of Social Medicine, as the
> result of some funding of a Trust which wanted a specific chair of Social
> Medicine.  The best way of showing what then happened was the disease of
> Tuberculosis (TB) – which if I read Brignell right, was regarded by McKeown
> as a disease of poverty, being one of infectious type, while those of
> affluence were non-infectious diseases. Personally this categorisation of
> disease is a load of nonsense, which Brignell then expertly shows to be so
> in the rest of his chapter on Social Science.  (Social Theory can be
> thought of as one of the most influential philosophical developments in
> human history bequeathing us the Nanny State and the environmental
> quangos).
> 
> 
> 
> Usually diseases are caused by something, and Brignell rightly uses the
> furphy of cigarette smoking causing lung-cancer as his next demolition job.
> My late father, a physician and surgeon, always maintained that individuals
> who developed cancer of the lung, also tended smoke cigarettes, and that
> the cigarette smoking was a symptom, and not the cause of lung-cancer.
> 
> 
> 
> Other chapters discuss statistics, in a highly readable form, then a brief
> description of the tools of the trade, essential knowledge to unravel the
> pronouncements of science published in the mass-media,  while the chapters
> Body parts, Substance Abuse, Tobacco Road, and Cancer are pretty obvious
> what they deal with.
> 
> 
> 
> The Chapter Holocaust was another matter – and what, I thought, has this
> well known WWII event to do with the subject of his book – and of course it
> wasn't what you think it was, it was actually Foot and Mouth Disease in the
> UK and how the Brits managed to completely stuff it up – veritably a
> holocaust of the intelligence type.  They and they alone, with their stupid
> scientific advisors decided to cull all the culprits, with the equally
> culpable epitome of bureaucracies, the European Commission.
> 
> 
> 
> A rather interesting observation was made on page 96 when the author
> discusses SIP's Single-Issue-Parties where groups of fanatics form
> political parties. This is usually a non event except in societies in which
> proportional representation operates, and then indeed we are politically
> affected by these minority fanatics.  The Greens, for example, managed to
> gain a virtual monopoly of the environment ministries of Europe and forced
> environmentalism onto those hapless Europeans.  As the Ice age doom theory
> literally froze in the middle 1960's, the Greens then reversed direction
> and starting screaming the opposite – global warming.
> 
> 
> 
> “The ease with which a specious theory such as global warming can be
> imposed on the world constitutes a textbook example of political
> chicanery”. And once a theory reaches a critical mass of acceptance, no
> matter how stupid or scientifically specious, it becomes established fact.
> 
> 
> 
> The rest of John Brignell writes about means you have to buy the book from
> his website but I can assure it was a riveting read – I finished it in two
> nights in bed.
> 
> 
> 
> This book is a welcome relief for the usual pseudo-science we are deluged
> with in the media. It is an excellent source of fact, and lists and
> explains important concepts so that anyone can separate the wheat from the
> chaff in their daily newspaper.
> 
> 
> 
> All in all a significant contribution to the demolition of quacks,
> charlatans and junk-science.
> 
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-- 
Steven Cummins MSc PhD
MRC Fellow
Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS

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