Errors & Omissions: Sensationalism can be bad for your health

Numbers, clichés and the turning of the Earth: misfires in this week's Independent

On Tuesday, the papers were full of the peril of contracting bowel cancer from eating bacon. As usual with such stories, the danger was presented in terms of relative, rather than absolute, risk. Our report said: “Just 50g of processed meat a day – less than two slices of bacon – increases the chance of developing bowel cancer by 18 per cent.”

Yikes! So eating bacon means you have an 18 per cent chance of getting bowel cancer?

No, it doesn’t. The piece does not say what your chance (absolute risk) of getting bowel cancer is. It merely says that the chance will be increased by 18 per cent (relative risk) if you eat processed meat.

Now, according to figures on the Cancer Research UK website, the lifetime risk of bowel cancer in the UK was calculated in 2010 at one in 14 for men and one in 19 for women. Call that one in 16, which is 6.25 per cent. That’s the figure that will be increased by 18 per cent if you eat bacon. And 18 per cent of 6.25 is 1.125. So a lifetime of eating bacon gives you an additional bowel cancer risk of a little over 1 per cent. Not quite so yikes as 18, is it?

If my calculations are faulty, I hope some qualified person will write in and tell me so. But if they are anywhere near right, the universal practice of reporting relative risks and ignoring absolute risks looks to me like sensationalism.

• An interview with Ben Whishaw in last Saturday’s Radar informed the reader that the actor had played the part of “the poet John Keats in Jane Campion’s Bright Star”. You mean as opposed to the other John Keats, the plumber? Do any readers really need to be told that John Keats was a poet? Actually, given the depressing emphasis on 20th-century fiction in A‑level English syllabuses, the answer may possibly be yes.

• Last Saturday’s magazine carried a piece on Victorian railway timetables.

“Back then, time was set locally according to the sun, so when a train left London at 6pm it was already 6.05pm in Oxford.” No, that would be the case if the sun rose in the west and set in the east. The way things have actually been set up, the apparent movement of the sun is from east to west, so when it is 6pm by the sun in London it will be only 5.55pm in Oxford. It is very easy to get that wrong.

• On Tuesday, we published an interview with Charlotte Church. The singer, we reported, was “sharp as a button and determined to be true to herself”.

The writer has conflated two different expressions for alertness – “sharp as a tack”, and “bright as a button”. That’s what happens with clichés. They no longer summon up a vivid picture in the mind and drowsy writers mumble about sharp buttons. A sharp button would, of course, be useless.