To the relief of the real science community everywhere, the era of Chris Wild is almost over at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). That means maybe they can get back to finding carcinogens rather than manufacturing them.

Center for Food Safety, a controversial litigation group that has been shown on numerous occasions to be conspiring to manipulate the public about American agriculture, is in the news again. This time for paying former Democratic Congressman, former race-baiting Cleveland mayor, and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich to promote organic food and products by undermining the competitors of CFS clients.

The Christopher Wild, Ph.D., regime as director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is coming to an end and the epidemiology community that would like to be regarded as more than statisticians data dredging to find new things to claim give us cancer are relieved. With recent rulings on bacon, coffee, and a weedkiller, all of which have come down in defiance of every legitimate science body, there were numerous calls for Wild to resign or be fired from the once-respected body - from everywhere except our own National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, where NIEHS Director and Ramazzini Institute member Dr. Linda Birnbaum has used her position to shield him from any criticism.

If you read corporate media journalism articles about epidemiology in the United States, you are not wrong for distrusting science more than ever. Using nothing more than statistics, every week some new trace chemical is an "endocrine disruptor", strawberries are bad for you (unless they're organic) and cell phones are causing cancer.

March For Science, an offshoot of Women's March, gave itself a positive name in 2017 but its motivations were not about science at all. It was about social authoritarianism and promoting a political agenda. And at the top of that agenda was being anti-Trump in much the same way the same groups eight and 12 and 16 years earlier were ant-Bush.

But things may be different in 2018. A lot of the more culturally militant people have quit or been (ironically) marginalized because the science community sees the real opportunity for gain - if they can apply pressure while also being part of a solution.

A lot less of this stuff from 2017

A few months ago JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a "Letter" noting that glyphosate was detected in urine. Nothing odd about that, in modern times we can detect anything in anything, but their media bait worked.