March 21, 2016
Briefly
- Many people have hypothesized, plausibly, that giving people risk estimates for disease based on genetics would encourage them to behave more healthily. The available evidence isn’t supportive.
- The Herald, for the second time in a week or so, treats a bogus poll as supporting evidence for something.
- Expensive but extremely effective hepatitis C drugs: an example of the sort of thing Pharmac might well want to fund ahead of Keytruda.
- Early newspaper data graphics for the 1849 cholera epidemic
- Barfoot & Thompson surveyed a bunch of young non-home-owning people in Auckland to ask them what they expected to pay for a house. I would have thought knowing more about housing prices than your customers was part of the point of having real estate agents. The Herald put it on the front page, too.
- In the US, doctors who get more money from drug and device companies tend to prescribe expensive drugs more. Note: not only is this correlation, but conceivably it could be a good thing — perhaps they are just more knowledgeable. Or, of course, not.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I find it interesting that the article on the miracle hepatitis drug does not mention that it will cost $3 billion to funded it out of the Pharmac budget of $800 million
8 years ago
It doesn’t, but it’s pretty obvious from context that the drug must be unreasonably expensive or Pharmac would be funding it already.
8 years ago
And, actually, the article does give both the number of people affected and the treatment cost per person, so it’s just simple arithmetic.
8 years ago