Because if 60 x 7000 equals 42,000, you're either in third grade or you are an anti-science mullah like everyone at Toxic-Free Future, who know a journal they pay to publish in isn't doing any peer review, and know that media allies like the SEO tinkerers who rewrite press releases for LA Times and Salon will be excited about the chance to pad their pageview quota.
If a claim that had any legitimate peer-review, beyond the 'their credit card cleared' editorial review kind, that math error would have been caught, and any reviewer would have asked why they used nanograms, knowing they did it to make their numbers seem larger.
Every day corporate journalists wonder why their level of trust among the public is down near Congress and every day they prove why.(1) If they used the same skepticism and critical thinking for groups they sympathize with, like anti-science activists helping lawyers create lawsuits, as they do if Republicans say something, they'd again be trusted guides for the public rather than having scientists immediately rushing to fight another fire media create.
Only after The Usual Suspects engaged in scaremongering the modern world - everything is killing us - did Dr. Joe Schwarcz, famed director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, get the attention he should have gotten before.
The activist paper estimated that plastic kitchenware from China (progressives love the casual racism of invoking China, it is why so many of them still claim MSG is poison) could lead to a median intake of 34,700 nanograms of Decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209, flame retardant) per day - due to kitchenware often being made from recycled materials.
They sounded the alarm, and advertising-hungry outlets amplified it, because that is so much higher than every science study, 80% of the very conservative reference dose of 42,000 that agencies like the US EPA created as a maximum no effect level allowed.
Except science turned out to be right and Toxic-Free Future was either incredibly stupid or intentionally deceptive. They were stupid about the math, off by 1000% - “I’m not bad at math,” Dr. Schwarz notes, so he saw their error right away - but were intentionally deceptive about using percentages and nanograms. “Risk analysis is a sketchy business in the first place, very difficult to do, especially if you don’t express units properly,” Schwarcz told National Post. “You can make things sound worse.”
That's the goal. The authors of the paper are issuing a correction because they know their mission has been accomplished. Their scaremongering claim got 1000% more attention than their error will, and they can just claim that Paracelsus was wrong, as biologists, toxicologists, and chemists are today, in noting that "the dose makes the poison."
If your goal is to undermine trust in science, you insist any dose is the same as 10,000 - it is all poison and must be banned.
NOTE:
(1) It may seem like bullying to criticize the New York Times or Washington Post again but I am blackballed at both, so what are they going to do, pull an article an editor wants to publish? Been done. Anyway, America's version of The Guardian, which is the official paper of the anti-science left, didn't miss their chance. But they used a modal and "might" absolves editors of any blame in the erosion of trust in science they cause every single day.
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