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A re-analysis of the supposed role of lead poisoning in Sir John Franklin's last expedition, 1845–1848 – CORRIGENDUM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2014

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Abstract

Type
Corrigendum
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

The authors of the above paper apologise to the readership of Polar Record and give notice that, as a result of a transcription error, one data point was omitted and another incorrectly included in their Fig. 1. The figure presents individual data points to illustrate levels of lead (μgPb/g) in ten bone types from seven skeletons of crew members of the Franklin expedition. Specifically, the data point having the value of 100μgPb/g for the ulna of Skeleton 3 was in error and is now deleted, whilst a data point which had been omitted for the calcaneus of Skeleton 6 has now been added with the value of 504.2μgPb/g. Please see revised figure below.

Re-analysis of the corrected data set confirms that these small changes have no effect on the outcome: the random effects model estimates the standard deviation and 95% confidence interval of the mean lead level (log scale) across the crew to remain exactly as reported in the published paper, namely 0.48 (95% CI = 0.27–0.85). Therefore, the conclusions to be drawn from Fig. 1, and from the paper as a whole, remain completely unchanged. The authors draw attention to the correction of this small but regrettable error in order to ensure full accuracy in the reporting of the results.

References

Millar, K., Bowman, A.W. and Battersby, W.. A re-analysis of the supposed role of lead poisoning in Sir John Franklin's last expedition, 1845–1848. Polar Record, published online 7 January 2014, doi: 10.1017/S0032247413000867.Google Scholar