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Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

42 pointsby 1h agotheguardian.com
11 comments
35m agoHN ↗

“Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

18m agoHN ↗

"Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?

15m agoHN ↗

Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

11m agoHN ↗

This problem with things like this is that the real science is extremely costly to do and the usage of chemicals across the entirety of our environment is exploding borderline exponentially with time and obviously these things we didn't evolve to tolerate and low and behold so many new health issues are just skyrocketing in incidence.

So what do?

Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

3m agoHN ↗

Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

The alternative is just making things up because it makes you feel better, so I’ll take actual science.

17m agoHN ↗

100% correct. These sorts of things rely on farming of bad observational studies, which can be found for everything.

7m agoHN ↗

But also, another way to frame this is "Linked to" is a keyword indicating we dont know enough positive or negatively for human impact, and therefore its a long term experiment.

6m agoHN ↗

If that's the meaning, the article is uninteresting and meaningless -- telling us nothing new.

16m agoHN ↗

I really hope that Canada joining the EU forces some stricter regulations on crops grown in Canada. It’s sad how poor of a job our government does to protect its citizens.

10m agoHN ↗

As usual in this kind of thing, "linked to" in this context does not mean anything like "actually known to cause breast cancer in humans." Just as we have cured cancer in rodents repeatedly, we have also caused cancer in rodents repeatedly, sometimes by giving them extremely high doses of chemicals that do not correspond to how much a human might consume.