A recent report from Al Jazeera English presented troubling sets of data about life since the Fukushima meltdown in Japan earlier this year. One of the most shocking details: A combined 35 percent increase in infant-mortality rates in several Northwest cities, including Seattle.

Now, a writer with Scientific American is taking that report to task. Michael Moyer writes that Al Jazeera reported infant-mortality for just eight cities: San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise. And the report cited, authored by Doctor Janette Sherman and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, only used four weeks of data to establish a pre-Fukishima trend.

And that just doesn’t add up, according to Moyer:

Let’s first consider the data that the authors left out of their analysis. It’s hard to understand why the authors stopped at these eight cities. Why include Boise but not Tacoma? Or Spokane? Both have about the same size population as Boise, they’re closer to Japan, and the CDC includes data from Tacoma and Spokane in the weekly reports. More important, why did the authors choose to use only the four weeks preceding the Fukushima disaster? Here is where we begin to pick up a whiff of data fixing.

Moyer examined a more comprehensive data set from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and came up with a different story. He plotted the 2011 infant-mortality rates in the eight cities in question, and found there hasn’t been an over-all spike.

On the contrary, the data shows a slight decline.

Moyer wrote:

Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering. This is not to say that the radiation from Fukushima is not dangerous (it is), nor that we shouldn’t closely monitor its potential to spread (we should). But picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics. Beware those who would confuse the latter with the former.

Visit seattlepi.com’s home page for more Seattle news. Contact Amy Rolph at amyrolph@seattlepi.com or on Twitter as @amyrolph and @bigblog.