How trustworthy are summaries of scientific articles?
Here's the summary written by the editors at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' Environmetnal Health Perspectives of a study titled "Toxicity from Fungicides in Mexican Backpack Sprayers:"
Fungicides that are metabolized to ethylene thiourea, a carcinogen, were sprayed on tomatoes by 49 heavily exposed workers. Steenland et al. measured chemical toxicity in these and in 14 lightly exposed landowners and 31 nonexposed controls. There was an increase in thyroid-stimulating hormone and also increases in genotoxicity, suggesting that the fungicide ethylenebis(dithiocarbamate) affected the thyroid gland and the lymphocyte genome in heavily exposed backpack sprayers.And here's the conclusion written by the study authors:
In conclusion, our data are consistent with animal and some human data in suggesting a toxic effect of EBDCs on the thyroid and on the genome (SCEs, chromosomal translocations). However, the exposure effects observed in our study were subclinical and of uncertain future clinical significance. Furthermore, exposure effects were modest, generally on the borderline of conventional statistical significance, and were based on a single field study with limited sample size. The observed effects should therefore be interpreted with caution.Any difference?
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