19 Jul A bad plant gets a dubious knock

A Gail Lethbridge column in today’s Herald claims the noxious Northern Pulp plant on the south side of Pictou Harbour is harming the health of Pictou County residents. Specifically, causing cancer.

Pictou County has the highest cancer rates in Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia has some of the highest cancer rates in Canada. Studies have not established consistent and conclusive links between mill emissions and cancer, but chemicals in mill production and pollution are identified as carcinogenic by the International Agency for Cancer Research.

And anecdotal evidence of respiratory problems, skin conditions, cardiovascular disease and cancers suffered by residents near the mill have led local doctors to identify mill emissions as a likely culprit.

The history of government and industry chicanery in the establishment of the former Scott Paper mill, and its record of environmental degradation, are scandalous, but Lethbridge’s health claims fall somewhere between tenuous and spurious.

I recognize her piece was not a peer-reviewed scientific journal article, but a newspaper column produced on deadline. Nevertheless, she provides no citations for startling claims about cancer rates in Pictou and Nova Scotia, nor does she indicate which of the 200+ cancers she is referring to. Lots of chemicals in everyday use are “identified as carcinogenic,” or toxic, but without knowing the dose, this information is meaningless. Dose is always crucial in evaluating such claims.

Lethbridge acknowledges that “[unidentified] studies have not established… links between mill emissions and cancer,” but goes on to cite “anecdotal evidence” of a hodgepodge of maladies that, she says, “[unnamed] local doctors” attribute to the plant. To state the obvious, studies that fail to establish something are not evidence of that thing. Anecdotes are notoriously misleading sources of medical conclusions, because they are prone to observer bias, cherry-picking, and inadequate sample size. When you hear, “anecdotal evidence” in connection with medical scares, best to think, “meaningless and probably misleading evidence.”

The Northern Pulp plant is a blight. Aside from the grotesque environmental damage it has visited on Pictou County, it is an iconic symbol of how the white race has mistreated, and continues to mistreat, Native Canadians. I will raise a lusty cheer when it finally closes. But is it causing cancer, heart attacks, or plantar warts?

Show us the evidence.