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Anti-Science Epidemiologists Have A New Friend In Government

In September, epidemiologists out to scare people about homeopathic - "detectable" - levels of...

Prop 65 Is A California Gimmick That Raises Prices For The Poor

Proposition 65 was a voter referendum that stated if a chemical was correlated to cancer, it needed...

Chocolate Is A Treat - It's Not An 'Antioxidant' Or Anything Except Valentine's Day Candy

Ignore epidemiology claims that chocolate is healthy. It is not, claiming it is requires the same...

When Told Lower Incomes Mean Less School Funding, College Students Become More Liberal

So many people want to move to the United States of America because virtually anyone who arrives...

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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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A recent paper claims the common weedkiller known as glyphosate gives mice Alzheimer's and therefore is a risk to humans.

Arizona State University researchers created an association between glyphosate exposure in mice and symptoms of neuroinflammation, as well as "accelerated Alzheimer’s disease-like pathology", whatever that is supposed to mean, and claim that farming could mean a persistent risk to human health.
I rarely win when it comes to cultural language stuff. Before 1999, an attractive older woman, for example, was to me a "Momshell" and no woman had any objection to a portmanteau of mom and bombshell (if they heard it - but a woman should not hear it, or your charm goes way down) yet after 1999's "American Pie" film the vulgar acronym "MILF" became the default. I have maintained for decades that we are worse off for it. If a young man used it in my presence where the woman could hear, I'd correct him. Not in a mean way, just by explaining there is a term that doesn't make him seem crass.
If you're an agenda-driven, lawyer-funded epidemiologist and really want to move the needle in media on scaring people, be so bad at math - literally the only thing an epidemiologist does - that you are off by an order of magnitude.

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.
Over 50,000,000 Americans get subsidized or free health under the Affordable Care Act but that doesn't mean usage of preventive care increased across the board. Instead, a new analysis found that the inflationary spike which led to much higher costs for housing, food, and utilities are barriers.

Data from 186 community-based health organizations in 13 states found that despite higher rates of primary care visits, patients experiencing social risks like concerns about food or rent were less likely to complete screenings when recommended by doctors.
Friends of the Earth and other litigation groups opposed to science are cheering the closure of AquaBounty's AquAdvantage salmon - the poster-child (decades of regulatory roadblocks) for how the US regulatory system is manipulated by lawyers to hold back technology and medicine - but progress marches on despite the public relations campaign by Greenpeace, NRDC, and others who stand against it.

Their persistent efforts to get pesticides either banned or regulated so tightly they act as bans have been wildly successful during the Biden years, but with Chevron Deference overturned at the Supreme Court political appointees can no longer get science banned by using agencies to create regulations that act like laws.
Two Presidents ago, political appointees engaged in behavior that didn't make much sense(1) and had no benefit for public health. For example, they declared there was an epidemic of something they invented called "pre-diabetes" and insisted that smoking cessation tools that were twice as effective as gums and patches but were not controlled by Big Pharma, plus cigars and pipes that have never killed anyone, were an epidemic in kids.