It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind:
1. We can detect anything in anything in 2025.
2. Presence is not pathology.
About the first Don't Be Alarmed qualifier, it is important to know the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) don't do any science at all. They do epidemiology, which is EXPLORATORY and why they grudgingly use terms like "correlated", "suggests", and "linked to" That is not to say epidemiology isn't important. We only learned that smoking and alcohol are killers due to epidemiology, we didn't do clinical trials on humans and give them cancer.
Yet those successes turned the field into a money grab. Universities, led by Harvard's School of Public Health, began to claim they founding 'smoking guns' like cigarettes everywhere, from saturated fats to gluten, and then promoted miracle foods like kale and quinoa, and promoted miracles diets like the Mediterranean and vegetarian. No science needed, they looked at a spreadsheet of lots of products and matched them to outcomes. They still do but now a lot of other schools do it also. Now government does also. When NIEHS epidemiologists look at enough spreadsheets and maybe add in 'we believe mice are little people' studies and find enough to declare statistical significance they write a paper and publish it in their in-house, taxpayer-funded magazine.
There is a big problem with all of that but let's just talk about the methodology. Statistical Significance has been reduced by activist epidemiologists and the trial lawyers who fund them and their allies to a "P ≤ 0.05 Fetish" culture. Epidemiologists with an agenda want journalists and the public to believe a p < 0.05 result will mean a false positive rate of 5%. That is actually terrible in the real world but to them it is compelling. Yet in reality the false positive rate can be 76% - if the hypothesis is borderline impossible, like that a weedkiller that acts on a biological pathway only found in plants can magically cause human cancer.
Despite that, a company is on the hook for billions of dollars because Predatorts, as such lawyers in the industry are called by the politically neutral science community, don't need evidence on their side, they only need jury members who don't trust science. Like in San Francisco, where Robert Kennedy-style progressive distrust of science is still part of the cultural fabric. That's why so many lawsuits get filed there.
Physicists would never allow one of their own to get away with that terrible confidence level and if your ATM was so inaccurate handing out money government would have bank executives in jail.
Yet it's a common metric for practical and even clinical significance in epidemiology and other soft fields like psychology.
The second Don't Be Alarmed qualifier is a form of 'the dose makes the poison.' You know it is true that water is good for you but too much will kill you, just like aspirin and caffeine and lots of other things. Illiterate peasants in the 17th century knew it.
Modern epidemiologists deny it. They will accept studies using rats fed 10,000X real-world levels of chemicals because they claim they want to detect "hazard" and disclaim that they are computing risk.(2) Yet in their press releases and media kits, epidemiologists in groups like IARC will talk about risk dozens of times, and advocate for bans.
When No Adverse Effect Levels were first created, we could detect parts per million. Anything below that was 'nothing.' Today, we can detect parts per quadrillion. That is 1,000,000,000 times more sensitive than 70 years ago. Are products suddenly less safe because detection one billion times greater can find the presence of a chemical? Not at all, presence is still not pathology. Yet every day we see claims about flame retardants and processed foods and pesticides which use that methodology to claim we are being harmed.
We got claims that not only did vaccines cause autism, from the same political demographic claiming to be on Team Science today, but that pesticides also did. Unless they were pesticides the National Organic Standards Board declared could be Certified Organic.
Nothing about that is scientific.
It is instead statistical homeopathy but environmental Predatorts know that they don't need science to convince a jury, they only need emotion. They need a juror who can be convinced scientists at DuPont are risking the lives of their own children by pouring toxic chemicals into groundwater. Scientists do whatever they are told by their evil corporate overlords.
Does that sound like Secretary Kennedy now? It does, except NIEHS was saying all of these things before Trump was elected. The Biden administration made efforts to throw out all chemistry, biology and toxicology - science - in EPA guidelines and replace it with epidemiology. Which they called fuzzy-wuzzy "real world data" despite lacking any plausible biological mechanisms for how volunteers claiming they saw a dead frog can infer it was caused by farmers.
Real world data like in the recent NIEHS-funded paper claiming they can detect ultrashort-chain PFAS in water and in blood. Hint, hint for journalists who don't know any better: Presence equals pathology.
It should work. Corporate media have repeated claims about everything from weedkillers being "linked" to cancer - only in a spreadsheet - to vaccines "correlated" to autism to pizza boxes "suggested" as endocrine disruptors, whatever that means.(3)
Those are all claims made by epidemiologists and touted in newspapers like Guardian in the UK and New York Times in the United States.
Many epidemiologists don't want to find true environmental harms, if any are left, they essentially exist to try and scare the public about science. The crossover among the US covert activist group and France's International Agency for Research on Cancer and Italy's Ramazzini Institute should be alarming, and perhaps it will be now that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is in charge of American health policy. A man they all loved when he was a loyal organic-loving, raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-denying Democrat, so inside the circle President Obama floated him to run EPA; a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and a solar energy magnate was considered the perfect choice to ban everything, because Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy.
We can only dream that this newfound We Stand With Science mentality remains in fashion once the party that dominated American universities is back in power. Given the 25 years of denial and conspiracy theories that existed before Trump and Kennedy, it is unlikely.
NOTES:
(1) Lan Cheng, Sarah Teagle, Jeffrey R. Enders, Rebecca A. Weed, Hazel B. Nichols, Detlef R.U. Knappe, and Jane A. Hoppin, Historical Blood Serum Samples from Wilmington, North Carolina: The Importance of Ultrashort-Chain Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, Environmental Science&Technology Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5c08146
(2) For reporters:
“An analysis of data from 10 studies estimated that every 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by about 18%” and “studies suggest that the risk of colorectal cancer could increase by 17% for every 100 gram portion of red meat eaten daily.”
But then "officially":
(3) I am drinking coffee as I write this. It is guaranteed to have changed my hormones, meaning coffee is an endocrine disruptor. It is the same logic that Guardian activist journalists use when they claim chemicals in the pizza box are making you fat rather than eating the pizza inside it.
Sometimes it seems like Guardian science and health articles are written on a dare. It must really cause agony in the bullpen that Kennedy is working for a Republican so they now have to oppose all of the things he said that they once endorsed.
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