Peer review scores bad bananas study

For 25 years Metrobank Foundation has been honoring quality tutors with cash, medals and public acclaim. The yearly prize has birthed similar tributes to exceptional artists, policemen and soldiers. Aptly the Foundation’s commitment to excellence was itself awarded recently. The Search for Outstanding Teachers won the 2010 Grand Anvil from the Public Relations Society of the Philippines. The Foundation also copped four Anvil Awards of Excellence for: the Metrobank Art and Design Excellence (MADE), The Outstanding Philippine Soldiers (TOPS), and the Country’s Outstanding Policemen (COPS).

Take a bow, Foundation president Chito Sobrepeña and teammates.

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The Solicitor General is egging the Supreme Court to rule that Gloria Arroyo should name the next Chief Justice. This, despite the constitutional ban on a President from making appointments during the last 111 days or so in office. But what if the next Congress, in an impeachment trial, finds this unconstitutional? Will the justices be co-conspirators with Arroyo to violate the Constitution and the election ban on midnight appointments?

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Flash: a peer review of the sizzling anti-aerial spray study has been leaked. And its contents, as circulated to the press, are bad. Long withheld from the public, the review criticizes the study’s faulty methodology and sampling. So, like a World Health Organization report before it, the review finds the study inconclusive. This debunks once again the alleged scientific basis for banning aerial plantation spraying.

Two questions now remain. Will the UP-Manila chancellor who set up the peer review finally release it, as scientific researching requires? And will the health department accept it, and so tone down its attacks on Davao region’s banana industry?

The reviewed study was done in plantation-side Sitio Camocaan, Hagonoy, Davao Sur, in 2006. Ten doctors of the National Poison Center had noted that barrio folk were ill stricken by exposure to fungicide from airplanes. The Dept. of Health that paid for the study released it only last year. By then Davao City already had banned aerial spraying. Four banana plantations had closed down due to fungal devastation.

All that time, the Pilipino Banana Growers and Exporters Association was labeling the Camocaan study as rigged. PBGEA’s own experts said data ostensibly were tweaked to suit a pre-conceived conclusion. That is, fungicides harm community health even if highly water-diluted to 0.3 percent and precision-sprayed. The leaked review, one of several, bolsters the growers’ stand.

The reviewer, anonymous for now, is a statistician at the UP College of Public Health. Her first focus was on the Camocaan sample size. Allegedly it was too small, so inadequate to attribute illnesses in the village to aerial sprays. A handful of residents supposedly exposed to sprays were matched with the unexposed population of the controlled area. Naturally the results were slanted against the Camocaans. The selection process was hazy, an indication of the researchers’ bias even before date gathering. The residents were picked not in random but convenient sample of only those “exposed”. Earlier the PBHEA interviewed the villagers the study sampled. They said they were told the researchers were on medical mission, so they showed their ailments, not knowing they’d be linked to aerial sprays. To this day the researchers have not submitted to Hagonoy health officials the promised list of supposedly afflicted Camocaans.

The reviewer then looked at the research design. It was found faulty in automatically linking the ailments to fungicide exposure. The researchers merely questioned mothers, a weak way to pinpoint symptoms since reliant largely on interviewees’ recall. Basic in scientific research is the validation of interviews.

Still on design, the reviewer no time reference about gathered data. The interviewees drew conclusions not based on facts. Mothers were asked what they thought caused offspring’s ailments, with no mention if these were during the week of the study or many years back. The research chief admitted last year being unfamiliar with aerial spraying. Banana growers asked how come he wants it barred, to the detriment of 200,000 families that depend on the fruit industry.

The reviewer focused last on the study’s conclusion. She blasted the highlighting of lower mean scores in mental status exams on Camocaans, compared to those in the control area. Those in the latter (Sitio Baliwaga, Sta. Cruz town, several kilometers away) were not significantly different. The study had said that 82 percent of interviewees were exposed to sprays, and 52 percent claimed to suffer eye pain and redness, or headaches. There was no description of ailments in Baliwaga. Yet the control area straddles a mango farm that heavily uses pesticides.

There are many other criticisms. At this point UP Manila chancellor Ramon Arcadio would do well to release the peer reviews. Nasty talk must be dispelled that he’s hiding them to protect the research head, a member of his church. Science must prevail, not personal ties and emotions.

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 “Too much focus on success can distort your overall focus on life. To die in the moment of success is better than to die in a moment of failure.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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