Category: Chemicals

A commentary in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine spotlights how easy it is to forget basic scientific principles even when you’re on the Harvard Medical School faculty. Continue reading Earth to Harvard Med faculty: DES is not an 'endocrine disrupter'

by Steve Milloy

What can feathers from eight birds tell us about mercury emissions over the past 140 years? Continue reading Mercury-laden albatross around neck of coal?

While flame retardants “work silently to safeguard the public and fire fighters and reduce injuries and property damage from fires,” the junk science mob is noisily working to have them banned for no good reason. Continue reading PBDE study spotlights need for junk science retardants

We’d like to spotlight a interesting statement from the American Chemistry Council made in response to last week’s trashing of the EPA formaldehyde risk assessment by the National Research Council. Continue reading EPA: Breath causes cancer

The cranks at the Environmental Working Group tried to amp up the tired, 35-year scare over formaldehyde yesterday with a release entitled, “Hair Straighteners Release Potent Carcinogen.”

Keying off the hair-straightening treatment known as the “Brazilian Blowout,” EWG wants to terrify salon workers and their customers about formaldehyde-containing products used in the treatment. Continue reading Hair Scare: Enviros attack salon treatment

Seventy-two House Democrats wrote to the EPA yesterday pressing the agency to complete its 20-years-in-the-making risk assessment on dioxin. Possibly they don’t know this, but one of the reasons the dioxin assessment has taken so long is that it was debunked and derailed by JunkScience.com and Ben & Jerry’s in November 1999. Continue reading House Dems press EPA on dioxin; Ben & Jerry's to the rescue!

… at ambient exposure levels in the U.S.

Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental over-Protection Agency proposed “the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic and other toxic air pollution from power plants.”

The EPA stated,

Toxic air pollutants like mercury from coal- and oil-fired power plants have been shown to cause neurological damage, including lower IQ, in children exposed in the womb and during early development.

This statement is false. There is no such evidence from any credible scientific study.

Mercury is known to be toxic only at extremely high (i.e., poisoning) exposure levels that have been rarely experienced in the real world.

In addition to the lack of credible positive evidence linking typical mercury exposures with adverse health effects, studies of Seychelles Islands children have failed to link mercury exposure with developmental or other health problems.

It is the dose that makes the poison — and ambient exposures to mercury in the U.S. are simply not high enough to cause any harm.

If we were to consider mercury as a neurotoxin, as the EPA does, then we would have to consider water as a neurotoxin, too, since overhydration can cause fatal disturbance of brain function.

For more on mercury visit JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

“After weathering a winter of intimidation, Mayor Bloomberg has apparently capitulated to an Environmental Protection Agency scare campaign. The issue: PCBs — three little letters that are about to sock New York schools with another $700 million funding drain.” (New York Post)

“A report released Tuesday on the city of Norman’s website shows that Cleveland County’s rate of stomach cancer is lower than the state average and that of other key areas in Oklahoma… The findings, culled from the Oklahoma Central Cancer Registry, were reported because of a study released in December 2010 by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, which found that Norman’s drinking water had the highest levels of chromium-6 in a 35-city study.” (Norman Transcript) For more on chromium-6, visit JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

We’ve all heard of giving the mythical 110% in terms of effort. Now DelawareOnline.com reporter Jeff Montgomery writes about a hazardous waste site in Delaware that is way more than guaranteed to give a visitor cancer. Continue reading Delaware waste site: 36,000% chance of cancer?

About the PCBs-in-schools scare, the NY Daily News opined:

Overzealous enforcers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s New York regional office have whipped parents into a frenzy and are threatening to force the city into spending untold millions on a crash cleanup. They need to back off… Only recently did the EPA come up with what the agency considers an acceptable level of PCBs in the air of a classroom. It defines an “elevated level” of the chemical as anything more than 300 nanograms per cubic meter of air – an extremely conservative guideline that leaves a huge margin of error. By the agency’s own math, it’s 300 times less than the amount that would give a child a 1-in-10,000 chance of suffering harm even after long-term exposure.

Even the media can debunk a needless $700 million clean-up in cash-strapped times.