Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer | Hacker News Reader

Research finds 485 chemicals in US pesticide products linked to breast cancer

theguardian.com

95 pointsTeever29 comments

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/...

It's what happens when activists take over science.

Yeah I concur, economic science is the prime example.

As usual in this kind of thing, "linked to" in this context does not mean anything like "actually known to cause breast cancer in humans." Just as we have cured cancer in rodents repeatedly, we have also caused cancer in rodents repeatedly, sometimes by giving them extremely high doses of chemicals that do not correspond to how much a human might consume.

I really hope that Canada joining the EU forces some stricter regulations on crops grown in Canada. It’s sad how poor of a job our government does to protect its citizens.

What EU regulation related to crop growth are you most interested in Canada adopting?

Banning Atrazine, Diquat, Mancozeb, Chlorothalonil and Bromoxynil would be a good start. I’ve noticed significantly less pollinator species in the past 20 years, many insects are dying out because of these pesticides. I won’t comment on cancer or other side effects as I’m not educated enough to know the truth, but it seems if we have one large world government universally agreeing that these things are bad, and should be banned, it feels weird that other g7 nations continue on with their head in the sand.

Outside of crop growth we're also way behind on food addatives like tartrizine, which we pump into our children's candy with wreckless abandon, my understanding is the EU banned these additives and a few that have similar long term health effects some years back. I'd rather the industry get in front of these things before the government has to regulate, but I guess we have to do things the hard way. The pessimest librarian in me guesses EU rules would ruin and put off balance many Canadian insustries, and regulations of the big food co racket will be last to happen and be exempt from the US shipping us their toxic foodstuffs recently banned stateside up here. It could easily be worst of both worlds. It makes sense that Canada and US are biggest trading partners, I certainly don't understand the ins and outs of all the trade vortexes across our borders, but I know politicians are milking the show for all it's worth while regular people would love nothing more then for the show to move on and get back to our usual crony capitalism where even the little guy can run a business that crosses the border without a department of wizardry of tarriffs, we miss you guys and we're stronger working together!

Tartrizine is not banned in the EU. It's still used as a food addative.

https://ec.europa.eu/food/food-feed-portal/screen/food-addit...

Oh gross! Thanks for the correction, I now wonder where my misconception came from! And there goes the silver lining that came to mind about Canada and the EU getting tighter, more trade with a higher transportation cost?

“Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

"Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?

Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

You are right

This problem with things like this is that the real science is extremely costly to do and the usage of chemicals across the entirety of our environment is exploding borderline exponentially with time and obviously these things we didn't evolve to tolerate and low and behold so many new health issues are just skyrocketing in incidence.

So what do?

Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

> Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

The alternative is just making things up because it makes you feel better, so I’ll take actual science.

It's not really making anything up, it's just not high on the tier list of evidence.

That's the other extreme, not "the alternative." Science is knowing fewer things, but knowing them well (to a high degree of certainty). Making stuff up is "knowing" more things but being uncertain and/or wrong. In between the two, there's a whole spectrum. I'm willing to "know" a few more things, but know them less well. Like being pretty sure pesticide exposure is not decreasing my risk of cancer for example.

The other thing is, I would be willing to be presumptively wrong about something like this, for the sake of safety. If someone wants to add a chemical to "the environment" (a commons) then I think the burden of proving it's safe falls on them.

> Making stuff up is "knowing" more things but being uncertain and/or wrong.

No, making stuff up is making stuff up. Uncertainty is what we get when we run an experiment and have some level of doubt about the outcome. What the OP proposes is to instead just do stuff to solve problems that haven’t been demonstrated, by doing things that haven’t been shown to have any effect. That’s not science - it’s religion.

Attempts to get around this by invoking the “precautionary principle”, or using broadly negative Bayesian priors, are basically just religion dressed in a lab coat. For example:

> Like being pretty sure pesticide exposure is not decreasing my risk of cancer

Completely made up. Even if you wanted to point to this paper (however bad), as evidence, it doesn't defend your specific claim.

That's fine.

WHAAAAAAAAAT?

I know what not to do: accept pseudoscience.

All “A is linked to B” tells you, and science has shown this time and time again, is that enough academics believe A is linked to B to do a number of hokum studies and show you the ones that came up with any correlation at all while burying all the ones that didn’t.

+1. On the opposite side of cancer research - We're already pretty good at eliminating cancer in rodents, it just doesn't translate well to humans. Animal testing might have done more harm than good for human healthcare in the long run. People stick to animal models out of a "we've done it this way forever" way of thinking, not because it still makes sense.

Yes. Rodents are extremely susceptible to cancers.

Might be as high as 57% of all rats developing cancers.

https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/16/3/194/473297/T...

But also, another way to frame this is "Linked to" is a keyword indicating we dont know enough positive or negatively for human impact, and therefore its a long term experiment.

If that's the meaning, the article is uninteresting and meaningless -- telling us nothing new.

Article does say the breast cancer rate has been increasing by one percent annually. That's significant.

How much of it is due to other sources of death being addressed?

Whoa, at that rate it will be over 100% by 2120.

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