47,000 Women Could Die As a Result of the New Mammogram Guidelines
OPS_admin | Nov 25, 2009 | Comments 0
By George Lakoff –
Cost-benefit analysis can kill. Scaling back on mammograms, as a government task force suggested, could result in 47,000 unnecessary deaths.
Cost-benefit analysis can kill. The failure to distinguish statistics from arithmetic can kill. In the current debate over mammograms, the number of women projected to be at risk of death due to cost-benefit analysis is about 47,000.
That is the approximate number projected to die by the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), if its recommendations on scaling back mammograms had been accepted. It is the task force’s number, if you do the arithmetic, which it apparently did not.
USPSTF statistics say that the life of “only” one woman in 1,900 will be saved if mammograms start at age 40 instead of age 50. In other words, a 40-year-old woman’s “risk” of dying from breast cancer in the next 10 years is only 1 in 1,900. That seems like no risk at all. 1 divided by 1,900 equals .000526. About half a woman per 1,000. Minuscule, right?
Now, how many women in America would be affected?
Filed Under: Wellness
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