Stay Skeptical
If an article is peer reviewed, published in a decent journal and available for free from the National Institutes of Health you'd think there's a pretty good chance that the headline numbers recounted in it would be fairly accurate, right? Well then if you've read "A Brief Review of Silicosis in the United States", you'd likely believe that 94% of all death certificates in the United States listed silicosis as the underlying or contributing cause. On the other hand, you could stay skeptical and check the data at the U.S. Census Bureau.
It's always enlightening to go from advocacy site to advocacy site and to add up the number of bodies claimed by each and then compare the total to the actual number of recorded deaths. The cumulative total always significantly exceeds the actual number revealing that the activists are simultaneously fighting over corpses and overestimating the number of victims. Even so, the claim in this new silicosis paper that from 1966 to 2002 seventy-four million of a total of seventy-eight million U.S. deaths were due to silicosis has to take the cake.
