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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way. 

Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good. 
Critics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.'

Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being informational. Though their work is often hyperbole and misinformation around a kernel of scientific truth, they see positive results as the goal, not science.
We don't get many new antibiotics in America despite there being a great need. The reason is simple; though 85% of American drug spending is for "generic" - it is off patent, so anyone can make it without doing any work - a lot of people want everything to be generic. And cheap. Big Pharma is hated.

There is nothing cheap about science, so companies who don't want to spend $1 billion and 10 years for a new antibiotic only to have some grandstanding populist in Congress declare that medicine should be free. Instead they will tackle more obscure drugs that are less likely to get attention.
Unlike US environmentalists, Belgian greens didn't flip and suddenly regard hydropower as a bad thing, they regard it as a viable part of their renewable energy strategy. All options are on the table, 50 percent of their electricity is even nuclear.  That's smart, nuclear is 2 times the energy capacity of natural gas and obviously an order of magnitude greater and more reliable than wind and solar.
Ask a hunting guide about what your first experience as a novice hunter should be and they will say a turkey. No one ever cried over eating turkey whereas a rabbit would be a bad idea for many.

A new survey in Human-Animal Interactions attempted to assess social perceptions in Singapore about ‘food animals’ versus 'friends' and 'worth fighting for', broken down as ‘Love’, ‘Save’, ‘Indifferent’ and ‘Dislike.’
Over 200 years ago, the age of modern agriculture began with fertilizer that wouldn't give you food poisoning if traces of it remained, like manure will.

A new paper found what you would expect, and a key reason why legacy pesticides used in the organic process require nearly 600 percent more chemicals per calorie;  pests evolve as the science does.