In Reply to: Re: What rubbish ! posted by Mike on April 19, 2006 at 06:59:30:

Surely that's what governments should be doing?

GW Bush would agree with you if tey were Muslim country governments - definitely shouldn't be teaching religion there. But if it was in a demokratik place like the USA then no religion unless it meant teaching creationism in the classroom or banning stem cell research on religious grounds.

But in our case - anecdotal evidence collected by newspapers surveying people on the side of the street or by telephone ain't enough. So there's no evidence without the numbers - Can't be spending tax payers money without good reason.

Interesting piece in the Irish Times yesterday about how the UN have gotten the AIDS statistics wrong in some African countries - the degree of infection may not be as great as feared Big discrepancies like 3% instead of 30% infection in certain categories. The reason is related to the manner in which they extrapolated from partial surveys of those coming into AIDS clinics to the rest of the population. Now a good census would have done the job properly there!