Saw this on a commercial recently (and it’s here on the web), and it made me wonder:
“one study found that up to 70% of people who had genital herpes got it from their partner when their partner had no signs or symptoms of an outbreak.”
Now, call me crazy here – but if I read that correctly, we can properly re-interpret that result thusly:
“one study found that more than 30% of people who had genital herpes got it from their partner when there were in fact (insert your own medical description here).”
Yes, 3 out of 10 people who have herpes either were not paying attention to where they put their genitals (which is bad,) or were paying attention and did not care (worse.) I don’t buy the “they didn’t know any better” argument. I don’t know of a single sex-ed argument or curriculum that includes a “red light/green light” slide show.
I’m not sure what else to say. That’s just a fascinating statistic, and one that is cleverly buried in the verbage.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, valtrex, herpes, statistics, advertising[/tags]
I’ve always been bad at math and usually add a zero whenever inapproriate. So it doesn’t surprise me that statistics like these get passed by without a blink. My father-in-law always questions stuff like this and then does the math in his head. I just assume it’s right, which, you guessed it, makes an ass out of me.It’s healthy to question stuff like this and look at it from all sides. Thanks for the reminder to use my head for more than a hat rack.
I wonder if the same people who have the aforementioned problems are related to the throng of individuals who vyed for the title of male contributor to Anna Nicole’s baby?
twain had it right about lies, damned lies, and statistics . . . and in philosophy they teach you all about the fallacies, and how correlation doesn’t equal causation, etc.
but the newspaper is littered with lies each day, or sort of lies, and I do spend some time on this from time to time on FB. . . . Like: The oil co’s have record profits? OK, sure, they do, but that’s because they’re twice as big, and profit – per – employee may be down . . . Or: The US has 5 percent of the population, but produces 25 percent of the carbon emissions? OK, true, but we ALSO produce 25 percent of the goods and services in the world, dammit, so the statistic is misleading. I could go on and on. Any paul krugman column usually has three lies in it. maybe he’s down to one or two these days.