As we wait for the next bunch of rodents to drop dead, to fill the minutes there's a new report on health scares of the past. Published by the American Council on Science and Health, "Fact versus Fiction" is the kind of history that should be required reading for every regulator at the FDA and EPA. But many seem very busy dreaming new ways to abuse rodents.
Beginning with the great cranberry scare of 1959 and concluding with the cellular phone hysteria of 1993, the report is a hit parade of the 20 biggest health scares of the past 40 years. Ralph Nader's killer hot dogs are remembered in number 5 (nitrates), the Love Canal saga with its evacuation drama in number 10, and toxic teeth in number 18. Toxic teeth? This dimly remembered panic of 1990 sent countless people to the dentist to extract "poisonous" amalgam dental fillings supposedly leeching mercury into their gullets.
All show common themes and patterns. There's the indiscriminate extrapolation to humans of lab tests involving cancerous rodents pumped with enough stuff to kill Godzilla. There is a basic ignorance of toxicology, with consumers left to fret over a single, harmless molecule. Add to that a widespread fear of synthetic chemicals even when nature herself has cooked up the same substances in far greater quantities in her great cosmic lab.
In the case of hair dyes, number 8, the rodents drank the stuff, not the common method of application in humans. But the real masterpiece of media hype in the service of bad science is the study's prize exhibit, Alar (number 16). While you only needed to down 25 bottles of hair dye every day for the rest of your life to feel unwell, Alar required drinking 19,000 quarts of apple juice every day to equal the exposure suffered by mice.
These cases make for diverting reading until one begins totaling up the costs. By the time the dust cleared around Alar, apple growers had lost an estimated $250 million and processors another $125 million while the U. S. taxpayer was stuck with a bill of $15 million to pay for the Department of Agriculture's emergency purchase of leftover apples. Maybe the bill can still be sent to Meryl Streep, one of the leaders of the crusade, Mothers and Others For Pesticide Limits.((In fact, Alar is a growth regulator, not a pesticide.)
Even worse, scarce funds end up being diverted from serious health hazards or needy institutions, most obviously in the case of health scare number 19, asbestos. Manhattan's ambient air probably has the same fibers per milliliter (averaging 0.0005) as the typical school building. But prompted by fuzzily worded EPA guidelines, entire school districts throughout the U.S. have nearly pau perized themselves on asbestos abatement programs of benefit primarily to specialized construction companies and eager litigators. The lifetime risk to schoolchildren exposed to even 0.001 fibers of, chrysotile asbestos per millimeter of air for a minimum of 10 years is estimated at one additional death in 100,000. That's three times less than the risk of being felled by lightning.
Is the American public becoming more sophisticated in separating facts from fiction? The Alar scare ultimately cast some doubt on the "mouse-as-a-little-man" premise in predicting cancer risks in humans, and the author of the report, Adam J. Lieberman, ends on a faintly optimistic note.
Yet the poor rodents. Alar, nitrates, aminotriazole, cyclamates, saccharin ... Short of modeling smallsize sleepwear laced with the flame retardant tris (number 9), there is no substance, no indignity rodents haven't endured. They can probably sprout tumors at the sight of an approaching lab coat. Maybe it's time for the animal rights lobby to take up the cause of mice and their rat cousins.
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