There is a pretty good movie about this topic, Dark Waters. The movie is well informed, largely accurate, and more factual than this article. The main protagonist of the movie is actually Robert Billott, the author of this article.
How much fucking scarier can it get than carcinogens, mutagens, and birth defect causing chemicals being spread througout our entire food and water supply while any attempts to inform about it are systematically supressed?
If you are not scared, you must be blessed with not having seen anyone in your life get cancer.
E.g What is the primary route of ingestion?
Is it more or less dangerous than eating BBQ?
Is usage already being curtailed?
This is Teflon before 2016. If you were close enough, it was in drinking water... water you would have used for growing your own food. Organics would have provided zero protection.
So now, as we struggle to live through a once-in-a-century pandemic...
This is just so categorically false, there has been both the HIV/AIDs pandemic and the Asian Flu in the 60s both were/are way more deadly.
There were no country-wide lockdowns for months for AIDS, there never was any factual reason to believe AIDS could be transmitted even by being in the same room as an infected person, there were no people dying in hospitals because there were not enough ICU beds because literally every single bed was occupied by another person infected, there were no entire industries employing many many millions of people being destroyed overnight (hospitality, tourism, events, sports).
Again: don't get me wrong, AIDS has been a devastating illness especially for the LGBT community. Still, doesn't mean that it's wise or sensible to compare it with coronavirus.
Most people dying have underlying conditions
It is the illness that's causing havoc because people are filling up all available ICU beds - and to make it worse, they're needing intensive care like ventilators and ECMO far longer than previous illnesses!
A relative of mine is a doctor and beds occupancy is often high in this season: this is because hospitals try to work at capacity and extra beds can be converted into ICU beds when needed.
This is how the NHS managed to survive the peak back in March (and how it will probably survive this peak which seems to have similar numbers).
I'm sure saying it doesn't make for a very compelling headline though.
Meanwhile people with more serious diseases (eg cancer) are postponing going to the hospital and dying.
I also consider the lack of scaling capabilities of our public sector to be a shame and I think we should put the private (which was heavily affected by job loss caused by the lockdowns) sector to work on it (converting privately owned businesses into it, speed training people to deal with the illness - we had almost a year to prepare).
But I don't see our society being agile enough to handle it in time from a regulatory point of view.
And while I get that most countries haven't completely shat the bed with their COVID responses like we have here in the US, those countries doing better (like New Zealand and Taiwan) have been able to react accordingly and return approximately to normal.
“the dose makes the poison”
We should not load ourselves unnecessarily but be realistic still not overusing strong scaring tactics regardless of circumstances as we will be powerless handling more serious cases presenting themselves. There is difference between going hysterical and being cautious.
You haven't demonstrated that this is "hysteria" and your own blasé attitude is worth imitating.
Also demonstrating if the level of hysteria reached, really? : ) Come on! Do you know some scientific method to accurately and objectively measure it so it will not be an individual/group human perception? I don't think so.
Consider this as it really is: a strong perception from the public. Thank you.
Warning: This post contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects blah blah Prop 65
It's fine to be scared of things, and talking about scary things, but when you intentionally work to scare people for profit, that's a pretty shitty thing to do. At that point, you're no longer informing the public, you're trying to provoke a disproportionate and often irrational response for your own financial gain.
Cancer is the default disease, it amounts to a cell copying error, if something else doesn't kill you, you eventually develop it. It's basic statistics.
Life expectancy has never been higher, I'm not saying we shouldn't watch out for dangerous substances in the environment, but there will always be some, and the relative risk is usually quite small.
It's not if suddenly, life expectancy went down by 10 years and we cannot explain it. This is more like: "mhhh interesting, we should take a closer look at it".
Alcoholic beverages or going out in the sun are probably bigger health risks.
This is the exact same tone the anti-vaccination crew consume constantly - it holds no numbers, and threatens us with words like "poison", "unique properties", and "have confirmed links", without specifying how strong those links are, or how much actual impact they have. With a good study, you can have a statistically significant outcome of "increases the odds of rectal cancer over a lifetime by 0.0001%", but that shouldn't really motivate much change, since you can say that about bananas.
It's attention-inducing alarmism: "scaremongering".
Most of the country consumes 'science' only through the lens of journalism, and journalists have been doing an increasingly awful job of helping readers distinguish between real problems, potential problems, and non-issues. Fear sells a lot better than science does.
Writing like this belongs on Taboola headings, not in an article about genuinely scary shit.
https://osher.ucsf.edu/patient-care/integrative-medicine-res...
Someone being scared depends on so many things and it is subjective. On the other hand being paralyzed by our mind projections or being prepared to do something about is different thing. Flight of fight response...
Personally I would rather know, whatever information is, and how bad it is, than choosing alternative to bury my head into the sand when ever says something that is bad. You can act only if you have information, and only way to propagate information (unfortunately) in our society is if it shocking. Good news simply do not sell papers. Just imagine, in IT projects, someone finds a back door or Zero-day exploit, and you alarm the company and they answer, "nah it is all ok, stop scaremongering users" ?!
I am trying to imagine doctor that says to the colleague, this man has serious heart failure or cancer, but I should not tell him as that may scared him.
Trying to remember the movie scene/motivation speech where narrator says "Fear is good it keeps you alive."
Fear is good prevent us doing stupid things...
No. What is scaremongering is spending 2/3rds of an article playing up how teflon poisoning our blood is some tightly-guarded secret by nefarious actors twirling their mustaches and laughing at birth defects.
That is: this particular article in question is written in a way that puts scaremongering over actual actionable information, to the point where it ends up crossing into unintentional comedy by reading like the crazed ramblings of someone taking "dihydrogen monoxide" pranks at face value.
Issue is - it was tightly-guarded secret by nefarious actors, and still is because "informing" as you say does not do anything. I do not know how you call the people who poison other people for the sake of profit, but historically if you do it on small scale they call you murderer and you end up behind the bars. I would like to avoid quoting Stalin here. By many country law, for instance if you see crime in progress (rape, murder, robbery...) and you do not do anything about it you are defined as accomplice, in DuPont no one said anything, they had mortgages, families to feed, salaries and investment to protect.
So, DuPont knew all along that their product is not safe because they paid for the tests, and they hid the results. Their explanation was and still is that Teflon is too valuable and it is American product. So, lets scale this down, let's say I make a alcohol beverage, and it has poisons levels of methanol, and I know about it I know it is deadly, but I serve you that drink never the less because my excuse is, "I would be too ashamed and I will lose profit", so my question to you is what I am doing criminal is it evil and wicked?
Now, what if you scale that same beverage to the entire planet, and you do not tell anyone, because business is booming? People are poisoned slowly ...
"In 2019, DuPont led the Toxic 100 Water Polluters Index.[34] The film Dark Waters dramatized a legal case against DuPont related to contaminating a town in West Virginia with unregulated toxic chemicals which poisoned thousands of individuals, this case led to DuPont finally settling all 3,535 cases for $670.7 million."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)
In DuPont case they settled for $670.7 million and no one ended behind bars, and government needed years before reeling finding, while at the same time DuPont was lobbying and using different kind of other tricks to stop the entire case. DuPont for instance delayed the case, and prolong poisoning of all people on the planet, by finding loophole that says that case can be run against them on person bases. The entire battle lasted for 20 years. And you tell me that is not nefarious? How many people do you know that had perseverance to continue battle for 20 years, when you are running out of resources and everyone is abandoning you?
And I would like if you could explain me what is "actionable information"? You cannot go to hospital and say, please extract PFAS and PFOS out of me, it is deposited in our bodies, slowly killing us and we cannot do zip about it, only thing we can do is go for DuPont management (as it seems from the 2019 they have not change the way they do business) and shut them down forever and put all connected behind the bars.
Through exactly which sources, and in what dosages?
> slowly killing us
At what rate? At what dosages? With what symptoms?
This is what I mean by "actionable information". If the article spent anywhere near as much time explaining the actual details of the risks as it did trying to paint DuPont as mustache-twirling villains, people might actually be able to make an informed decision of "alright, well I should limit my exposure to these things by this much, and keep an eye out for these symptoms, and we should enact these measures to prevent further harm".
And that ain't to say that DuPont is not a bunch of mustache-twirling villains -- only that the emphasis on presenting them as such is far less helpful than an emphasis on the actual details and an actual solution beyond "let's be mad at DuPont".
> "alright, well I should limit my exposure to these things by this much, and keep an eye out for these symptoms, and we should enact these measures to prevent further harm". As I said, you cannot, you are already poisoned, and you cannot remove it from the nature. You can just try to stop "mustache-twirling villains" to do the future harm, as they shown in 2019 they are capable of simply giving Zero Fs for what public wants.
Additionally, calling them "mustache-twirling villains" it is downplaying danger turning it into the light comedy piece, which will make public care even less about the issue. Just imagine I poison you and then when you get angry I use perfect stand up comedian skills and everyone laugh at you, and say "don't worry you will be fine, people dying anyway" - (Which was exact sentence of the women from Scotland refusing to wear the mask during Corona virus pandemic while she was thrown out of the airplane)
My point is that the author's reliance on hyperbolic and emotionally-charged language is what makes the article read like a light comedy piece. It's exactly the sort of rhetoric employed by anti-vaxxers and chemtrail believers, and it cheapens the message.
The facts are damning enough. Let them speak for themselves.
I think there's a place for running articles by major figures as-is. And Robert Bilott would seem to qualify as a major figure in this context.
Think of it more like an extensive comment on HN, by someone well-informed and a strong opinion on the subject.
Great Article