Comments on: A Correlation Between Month of Conception and Birth Defects, But Why? https://ecosalon.com/a-correlation-between-month-of-conception-and-birth-defects/ Sun, 29 Nov 2015 15:51:01 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.25 By: helen https://ecosalon.com/a-correlation-between-month-of-conception-and-birth-defects/#comment-3340 Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:20:36 +0000 http://ecosalon.com/?p=13197#comment-3340 As far as I know we’ve known for a long time that there is a month by month variation in birth defects. If memory serves me correctly too, this holds (for the same months) in the southern hemisphere, which, as the seasons are opposite down there, would rather confuse the pesticide issue.

I think the authors of this paper are pushing an agenda- or at least whoever wrote the press release* that the article you linked to is based on is- as the leaning on a pesticides link seems uncharacteristic of science journal publishing. Quite apart from anything else, so many things in the body are temperature related yet they seem to make little mention of the fact that these women would have their first trimester in the hottest months of the year, which would seem to me another interesting angle. On the other hand, ambient temperature would be a much harder issue to fix, so perhaps we ought to ‘hope’ that there is a causative relationship at play here with the pesticides!

*I am very impressed that Science Daily indicate that the article is written from press releases. Such transparency- if only we could get that in the British press!

Remember, correlation does not even IMPLY causation: http://xkcd.com/552/

helen’s last blog post..From the Ghetto

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