Are Plastic Bag Bans Making People Sick?

theodp writes "A paper by Wharton's Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright suggested that San Francisco's eco-friendly ban on plastic bags might actually be killing people. Klick and Wright found that food-borne illnesses in San Francisco increased 46% after the bag ban went into effect in 2007, with no such uptick in neighboring counties. Most likely, the authors concluded, this was due to the fact that people were putting their food into dirty reusable bags and not washing them afterward. But Tomas Aragon, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and health officer for the city of San Francisco, begs to differ, arguing that in order to establish a link between the bag ban and illnesses, the authors would have to show that the same people who are using reusable bags are also the ones getting sick. Aragon offers an alternative hypothesis for the recent rise in deaths related to intestinal infections, noting that a large portion of the cases in San Francisco involve C. difficile enterocolitis, a disease that's often coded as food-borne illness in hospitals which has become more common in lots of places since 2005, all around the U.S., Canada, and Europe (for yet-unexplained reasons). 'The increase in San Francisco,' he suggests, 'probably reflects this international increase.'"

Comments

Authors are lawyers

[schneidafunk]

If you go to the source paper you'll notice both authors are from law school. So, that being said, why are they writing about a medical issue and using questionable statistics?

Here is the abstract:

"Recently, many jurisdictions have implemented bans or imposed taxes upon plastic grocery bags on environmental grounds. San Francisco County was the first major US jurisdiction to enact such a regulation, implementing a ban in 2007. There is evidence, however, that reusable grocery bags, a common substitute for plastic bags, contain potentially harmful bacteria. We examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase. "

Re:Authors are lawyers

[schneidafunk]

I generally am skeptical of anyone publishing claims that are outside their field of expertise. As the rebuttal from Tomas J. Aragon, MD, DrPH, Health Officer, explained there are some serious defects in their study:

"The basic study flaw is that persons that use reusable bags frequently may not be the same persons that were diagnosed with gastrointestinal bacterial infections in their study. This is the reason epidemiologists will not use ecological studies to test causal hypotheses. At best, ecologic studies raise epidemiologic causal hypotheses but cannot test them."

Yeah, a paper on public health by a law professor

[Anonymous Coward]

whose other papers include:

- legal abortion turned your daughter into a herpes-ridden slut
- helping poor people treat their diabetes just leads to more fatties, yo
- health insurance mandates are so bad that they drive people to drink
- hey, you know what would really solve our health care problems? Tort reform.