No abstract

SUMMARYThe 1978±1982 New York State TCE / Leukemia dataset is often used to test new cluster detection methodologies. We augment that dataset with demographic covariates from the 1980 census and ®nd evidence that the relation between several of the TCE wastesites and elevated leukemia rates is probably confounded by the population's age and employment characteristics. This demonstrates a problem that is often mentioned, but seldom touched in detail±clustering can be related to covariates not directly related to the risks of interest.