timr
10 hours ago
The actual paper [1] is quite bad. They mine the literature for chemicals with any publication that suggests a link to cancer (or appearance in certain databases based on the same approach), and then spend most of their efforts determining amounts of production and use of the chemicals in question.
This is almost pure propaganda. No actual science has been performed, and the quality of the result is directly dependent on the underlying quality of thousands of individual studies that haven’t been reviewed.
(To be completely fair to the authors, the Guardian article is completely misleading. Their goal was not to identitfy carcinogens, but rather, to engage in “risk reduction analysis” for the universe of chemicals that might plausibly be considered a carcinogen if you didn’t have any other evidence and cast a ridiculously wide net. Still a dumb goal, IMO, but not as dumb as the article makes it sound.)
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/evhpaz/article/doi/10.1021/EHP.6c00022/...
userbinator
7 hours ago
It's what happens when activists take over science.
UpsideDownRide
6 hours ago
Yeah I concur, economic science is the prime example.