The year 2018 began much like every year does, full of promise and hope. And it ended like almost every year does, jaded and weakened by compromise. 

Though a budget shutdown is in the news, hyperbolic claims about science being left behind are just political spin by mainstream science media; the real science and health crimes were committed by many of those same journalists.

Since you clearly prefer science to hype, here are three manufactured health scares you can leave in 2018.



1. Cleaning your kitchen will make your kid fat.

European scientific decision-making is often overtly political and that can lead to decisions which defy common sense.

Case in point; disposing of food waste.

In some countries they want food waste separated into its own garbage can but people can't use plastic bags, even if modern science has created a plastic that is just as compostable as the food.

In some countries they can.

There is no way for science to Brexit so companies, researchers and even pro-science politicians remain stymied in parliament-style governments, which must cater to numerous constituencies, often in conflict with each other. 

With the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rightly cracking down on sales of vaping devices to minors and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams making a recent statement of concern, media are again repeating claims of an epidemic of vaping among children.

Despite another year of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hyperventilating weeks after a foodborne illness occurs (devastating lettuce farmers while showing how they little they know when exaggerating what they do know), the more evidence-based bodies at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture made 2018 safe to go into the pantry again.

Because few people are all that panicked about lettuce, but everyone wants to know about pesticides.

In 2013, the Windsor city council voted 8-3 to remove fluoride from water. This was not the work of right-wing John Birch Society members, who were against fluoride in the 1950s because it was government interference in water, this was the result of left-wing anti-science activists. A few have wrapped themselves in the flag of personal choice about consumption, but most are honest in claiming they link negative health effects to fluoridation.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of five years of death certificates (2011-2016) found that among drug overdose deaths 29 percent were due to fentanyl by 2016, a huge leap from 4 percent in 2011, when oxycodone was most dangerous at 13 percent.