The following appeared in a memo from the director of a large group of hospitals."In a controlled laboratory study of liquid hand soaps, a concentrated solution of extra strength UltraClean hand soap produced a 40 percent greater reduction in harmful bact

A director of a large group of Hospitals is sending a memo indicating that the chain should change the ahnd soaps in all of the hospitals to UltraClean which is more powerfull than other soaps. He bases his argument in two surveys, one in a laboratory and the second in one of the hospitals. However, he should support more evidence in order to support his argument. I have found the types of these evidence and I am going to examine them in the following paragraphs.

The director is mentioning a controlled laboratory study that indicatated that UltraClean produced a 40% greater reduction in bacteria than a regular soap cleaner. This is clearly a fact, but more information about the way the study was conducted is needed. As a counter example, recently it was found that a large car manufacturer has tainted with the car's software in order to produce fewer carbon dioxide emissions during regular controls in a "controlled" environment and when on the road the emission were 10 times up. What if the same situation applies in this study too? The director should supply more evidence regarding the situation of the study and most of all he should find more evidence regarding the credibility of the laboratory that conducted it.

The director is making a fallacy by using data from a group to extract a result for another group. More specifically, he is mentioning a test at a local hospital from the Group that was conducted among doctors, nurses and visitors of patients and then he states that a 20 percent reduction in patient infection was achieved through the use of UltraClean. The survey was conducted without asking the patients. Therefore more surveys including patients should be conducted in order for these results to be credible and to support the argument the director is making.

Even if we disregard the fallacies in the above mentioned paragraphs we could not disregard the following. The author of this memo is a director in a large group of Hospitals. By large probably meaning many hospitals in a large region, therefore, the test in one hospital is not sufficient at all to support the change of hand washing soaps in all of the hospitals in the chain. For instance, if in this particular hospital in Worktown, the climate is very good, not extreme cold or heat and the people have development more antibodies than other regions this could affect the test survey because it is based on a test that was conducted in Worktown and it was contradicted with data from other hospitals in other regions. Therefore, the director before concluding that the group should change all of its hand soaps in all of the hospitals must provide data from the same hospital before and after the use of UltraClean and of course conduct the same survey to at least 20% of the group's hospitals in order to support his argument.

To sum up, in the paragraphs above the fallacies the author is making are mentioned and a series of evidence that he should provide are being offered. In order for the director to make this proposal that would cost a lot of money for the transition to the hospital group he should provide more evidence to make his proposal credible and sufficient enough.