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- Hacker News
- “Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.by mattmaroon
- 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.
- 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.by loeg
- The actual paper [1] is quite bad. They mine the literature for chemicals with any publication that suggests a link to cancer (or appearance in certain databases based on the same approach), and then spend most of their efforts determining amounts of production and use of the chemicals in question.
This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.
(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/evhpaz/article/doi/10.1021/EHP.6c00022/...
by timr