Tuesday, November 13, 2012 A reference post. A month or two ago, there was a study of rats feed GE corn in France. It was widely criticised at the time. Recently it's started being referenced in scary pictures the flick through my book of face feed, upon which I commented. In the comments I was asked to elaborate on my position that a seriously flawed study, which I'm going to do there, because facebook comments are an annoying place to try and lay out something like this. So apologies to those of you for whom this is a rehash. The study was touted as being a long term (2 year) study as opposed to the more common 90 day test. On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing and it could very well have been. If you were going to do a long term study and report on the incidence of tumours though, I would suggest not using a strain of rats (Sprague-Dawley rats, a particular strain of lab rat) that are highly prone to get tumours after 2 years anyway - that's living a life without being experimented on. Something that has been known about for many, many years. On top of that the number of rats used in each group was woefully small - 10 rats in each group. This brings a large amount of statistical variability into play. The paper linked to in the last paragraph gave 86%  chance of tumour development for males