One-eyed Epidemiologic Dummies at Nuclear Power Plants

Kraemer and Arminger in a preceding article in this volume insinuated that in a meta-analysis on childhood leukaemia in the vicinity of nuclear power plants (NPP) in five countries gross methodological errors had led to falsified statistics. Major assumptions were a) arbitrary exclusion of publications with nil results, and b) publication bias in conduct of the meta-analysis. It is demonstrated that all appropriate publications providing data on incident cases of leukaemia and on the underlying population or rates of incidence with confidence intervals had been included. In addition it is demonstrated that all publications excluded from the meta-analysis either did not provide sufficient data on NPPs or cases of these publications had been already included into the meta-analysis from other publications.