News Items That Made My Skin Crawl
May 8th, 2010
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Not sure if all readers will feel the same, but recently I’ve come across a few news items that really just made me feel like tearing my hair out. They’re so dead wrong, misleading and ridiculous and yet are reported in otherwise credible news outlets as if they were meaningful.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
We should address this issue proactively even if we do not fully understand its magnitude. Our government has faced similar public health threats in the past. In 1965, although there was no scientific consensus about the harmful effects of cigarettes, Congress required a precautionary warning label on cigarette packages: “Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” More specific warnings were not required until 1984: “Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.”
Should we have waited 19 years until absolutely certain before we informed the public about these risks?
Although more research on cell phone radiation is needed, we cannot afford to wait. There are 285 million cell phones in use in this country, and two-thirds of children over the age of seven use them. Manufacturers bury the SAR within their owner’s manuals, along with safety instructions to keep your phone up to an inch away from your body.
We don’t need to wait 19 years. There’s already volumes of scientific evidence.
Passengers may be suspicious of the low-level radiation doses coming from full-body scanners being deployed at U.S. airports, but a far greater threat comes from the radiation that creeps into airliners while in flight.
The phenomenon has been well known in scientific circles for years but has never gained much mainstream attention. That may change as the Earth enters an uptick of solar storms that are expected to peak within five years.
NASA has said the amount of additional radiation during such storms can be “profound.” The atmosphere protects the planet at ground level from most solar radiation, but in the air, especially on polar routes such as from the United States to northern Europe or Asia, jets fly above that protective layer.
LNT Strikes again.
A government report claims that the way Americans farm could be putting the public at risk for cancer and recommends people eat more organic products.
The study was issued today by the President’s Cancer Panel and is a look at the potential risks from the environment. The cancer panel has two members – the third seat is vacant – and both were appointees of President George W. Bush.
The study includes a chapter on agriculture and goes into a number of potential health hazards, including from pesticides such as the herbicide atrazine that’s used on corn fields but also from nitrogen fertilizers and veterinary pharmaceuticals. Fertilizer may increase cancer risk through the breakdown of the nitrogen during digestion, the study said. Nitrogen from fields seeps below ground and into drinking water supplies.
Fertilizer? Nitrogen? Perhaps someone should tell them that organic fertilizers contain the same nutrients, often in identical chemical compounds, which are just far less concentrated in the bulk of the material.
Memorial dedicated on the site of Monticello’s old Uranium mill
MONTICELLO, Utah (ABC 4 News) – In this southeastern Utah town Friday evening, cancer survivors dedicated a memorial on the site of an old Uranium mill. It is the same mill that likely gave them cancer.The black legacy of the mill is written on two panels at the memorial.
In 1941, at the dawn of the atomic age, the government opened a first of its kind Uranium mill in Monticello. The mill would play a vital roll in the outcome of World War II refining ore into the “yellowcake” used in the production of America’s first Atomic Bomb.
Even after World War II, the mill cranked out yellowcake to make more bombs as the cold war with the Soviet Union heated up.
Monticello’s Uranium mill was closed in 1960. It would be take 250-million dollars and another 40 years before the government would complete dismantling and cleaning up the mill site.
Yeah, because, you know, cancer never just happens with no attributable environmental cause.
Sometimes I think it’s hopeless…
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 9:35 am and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Culture, Misc, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 8th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
What we are seeing here is the yellowing of the mainstream press, in responce to falling readerships. There was I time that the only place you would see rubbish like this was in the check-out line tabloids, the broadsheets were printing actual news. Now everything of note I find in my morning paper, I have read on the net skimming my RSS feed over coffee, before the paper gets to the door. It’s so bad that the Montreal Gazette, one of the oldest and longest continually published newspapers in North America, was giving papers away at subway stations.
However this does not excuse the type of sensationalism and poor research that you illustrated in the lead post. One does wonder however just how many people this sort of tripe is reaching.
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May 8th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
No medical consensus on cigarettes in 1965?!?!?! I think, as was noted in an earlier post, the consensus was unanimous by the early 1950’s and even before that, most medical professionals knew smoking was not a healthy habit.
DV82XL said:
Maybe, but that is not a good business model. The race to the bottom to try to make more sensational news is a losing battle. You gain some readers in the short term, but they get numb (or wise) to the scam. Also, someone always can out-yellow you.
Keeping a measure of respectability and generally reporting well will not get you the same kind of short term mobs of readers that taboild sensation publishing can, but it keeps a steady following of loyal readers and keeps the respectability of a publication. This may not seem like a way to make the big bucks in the short term, but muckraking is a flash in the pan.
I base this on when this happened before. Early 20th century when automatic printing got really cheap and newspapers started to flood the market. It was even worse than today with Hearst and all the others were trying to cook up the most sensational stories they could. It didn’t last. People panicked and bought the papers with the shockingest headlines for a couple of years and then wised up and most of them folded. A few survived and many that resisted the temptation to race to the bottom weathered the storm.
If they think this is how to compete in a new information world, I think they’re sadly mistaken. It won’t last. There will always be a market for descent reporting. Yellow reporting has a market that gets flooded and then dries up.
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May 9th, 2010 at 4:32 am
That pesky Nitrogen. Thank goodness we don’t normally come into contact with that deadly
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May 9th, 2010 at 4:33 am
That pesky Nitrogen. Thank goodness we don’t normally come into contact with that deadly chemical.
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May 9th, 2010 at 6:03 am
This shows how misinformed you are. I know from a sure source that the Illuminati have mixed a total of 78.1% of Nitrogen in the air you breathe.
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May 9th, 2010 at 10:21 am
SGT said:
Well to be fair, this article is very poorly worded. When the phrase “nitrogen pollution” is used to describe the effects of agriculture, what they’re really talking about is ammonia (or in some cases nitrates).
But it’s still bunk. The amount of ammonia that reaches the drinking water supply is trivial and we’re exposed to tiny amounts of ammonia all the time. Our bodies actually produce it. However, high concentrations can damage tissue, which is why our bodies actually have another clever mechanism that transforms most of the ammonia into urea which is less potent and is eliminated in urine.
The idea that fertilizers would increase cancer risk is totally bunk. All organic matter contains significant amounts of nitrogen compounds. Nitrogen is a vital nutrient in the life cycle of all plants. Whether its provided by synthetic or natural fertilizer really does not matter.
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May 9th, 2010 at 10:53 am
There are only two kinds of nitrogen compounds that serve as fertilizer for plants; there’s ammonium nitrogen and there’s nitrate nitrogen. Urea as found in urine and some synthetic fertilizers hydrolyzes to ammonia and carbon dioxide. Some bacteria oxidize ammonium ions to nitrites and then to nitrates; that’s why saltpeter(potassium nitrate) was made from potash and nitrate extracted from soil dug up beneath pig farms.
“synthetic” fertilizers contain exactly nothing that “organic” fertilizers don’t. It’s some mix of urea, ammonium nitrate, calcium nitrate, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, and so on. Calcium, potassium and phosphate being vital elements for plants that also must be included in “organic” fertilizers.
Ammonium nitrate is a particularly common fertilizer, but it is not usually sold pure and there are restrictions on buying it because pure ammonium nitrate can be mixed with fuel oil to make the tertiary explosive ANFO. ANFO is a great blasting agent; it’s cheap, it’s very safe to handle, it’s stable; it’s therefor ubiquitous in the mining industry and commonly used for terrorist attacks like the oklahoma city bombing and the 1993 bombing of the world trade center parking garage. ANFO is a tertiary explosive; i.e. it’s very insensitive to shock and a mere blasting cap won’t reliably set it off; a secondary explosive is necessary, like a stick of dynamite.
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May 9th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Another great thing about ANFO is that it is absolutely non-explosive, even if it is ignited by a primary explosive when it is not mixed. It can be mixed on-site and even insitu. Ammonium nitrate can create a small explosive on its own, due to decomposition, but it rarely does this and generally it is not very dangerous on its own without a fuel added. Fuel oil (Or kerosene or diesel or whatever) won’t explode. It will burn, but even then, it’s surprisingly difficult to ignite, especially in a standing pool.
You can actually get ammonium nitrate in a pure form in the US without a special license or anything. Any bulk industrial chemistry supplier will have it. It’s cheap too. It is used in those instant cold packs as well. If you were to try to buy a ton of it, it’s likely that a chemical supplier would be suspicious enough to notify the authorities – at least, if you were just some average person buying it for no apparent reason. However, many would be surprised to know that there is very little in the way of legal restrictions that would require them to notify anyone.
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May 10th, 2010 at 4:28 am
drbuzz0 said:
That’s… somewhat disconcerting. In Sweden and I believe most of the EU it’s hard to buy ammonium nitrate in bulk amounts unless it is blended with other components that make it time consuming to separate in pure form; if you have a legitimate need for blasting such as building a road, mining or conducting seismic imaging or something it’s easily obtainable and the Scandinavian countries use a hell of a lot of it on a per capita basis.
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May 10th, 2010 at 7:25 am
Speaking of organic farming (well sort of), I came across this today:
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May 12th, 2010 at 8:23 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Please tell me it’s a joke about sunlight.
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December 11th, 2011 at 4:03 am
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