and Statistics

I’ve touched on this subject before, but it keeps coming up in the media, so I’ll take the risk of repeating myself.

The Morgellons Research Foundation says:

Distinct geographic “cluster” areas of this disease have been noted near Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego in California

It then shows a little map with those four cities highlighted, which makes it look like California is breaking out with acne.

cal-spots-copy.jpg

Recently people have been noticing ominous parallels between those four random cities and medical centers. Here’s what they say on the Morgellons Research Foundation’s recommended forum:

Three of these cities, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, are home to a University of California Campus that includes a major medical center teaching facility and extensive bio research facilities.

Three of these cluster cities have an additional second University Campus located within a fifty mile range with a medical school and extensive bio research facilities.

San Jose is located 16 miles from Stanford Medical/Research facility and less than 50 miles from the UCSF Medical Center

This worries the lymebuster – perhaps they think this indicates that Morgellons is some kind of escaped pathogen which was simultaneously released from all four of these facilities. Is there any other way of explaining this?

Here’s what the lymebuster has to say:

The first person I showed this to said there is no possibility that the relationship is random. I am looking for a statistician to calculate what the odds are of these common factors of Morgellons cluster cities being random or not.

As someone else on this board likes to say, I’m a duck if all these converging factors are just a coincidence. I bet the odds against this being random are about a billion to one.

Close. Let’s see, if there are 400 cities in California, four of which are clusters of Morgellons and four have a med school with a bio research campus, what are the odds of them randomly being in the same four cites?

About 25 Billion to one! Higher than their guess, and they were including Texas. So clearly this relationship is NOT random. There must be something going on.

Okay, I’ll spill the beans, there are the most cases of Morgellons, and the biggest medical schools and bio-research facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego because:

THAT’S WHERE EVERYONE LIVES!

Top ten California cities by population:

1 Los Angeles 3,819,951
2 San Diego 1,266,753
3 San Jose 898,349
4 San Francisco 751,682
5 Long Beach 475,460
6 Fresno 451,455
7 Sacramento 445,335
8 Oakland 398,844
9 Santa Ana 342,510
10 Anaheim 332,361

The Morgellons Research foundation is just tossing out meaningless sound bites for the evening news, and their fans at Lymebusters are concocting fantastical stories around these McStatistics.