Animal tests
Hamster: the figures I posted (you seemed to have doubts about them) were taken from a table in a report by the <b>federal Council on Environmental Quality</b>, a government agency, not by the industry or commercial company.
Hamster: the figures I posted (you seemed to have doubts about them) were taken from a table in a report by the <b>federal Council on Environmental Quality</b>, a government agency, not by the industry or commercial company.
Idahamster2: <i>Stories of cancer and AIDS cures are particularly pernicious in that there may be no medical treatment and desperate people may grasp at any hope ... However this hamster is skeptical of conspiracy theories in science and medicine. In the case of cancer there are plenty of people willing to ingest poison if it might cure their disease.</i>
I agree with you on the subject of desperate people seeking "magic" cures and leaving aside medical treatment. You can add to the list of poison ingesting the crotoxin, a treatment discovered and used by Argentine doctor Vidal for treating cancer. This toxin is extracted from crotalus snakes, the "cascabel" (rattle snake).
In a search in Google I run into this page, where the opinions of people are posted alongside (believers at the left, skeptics on the right) where you can compare them. They talk about the risk of SLS, a detergent chemical found in shampoos. It's worth a visit.
http://www.listas.utn.edu.ar/scyt-red/msg00396.html
But my statement about "huge doses of chemicals in animals will always cause cancer" is not misleading. It is a fact. That there are animals with higher sensitivity (to chemicals found in the environment) than other animals does not makes that fact less real. If you have time and interest in the subject, please read what late Aaron Wildavsky said at an interview in France, when he gave a lecture on the subject of risk in a conference of the International Center for Scientific Ecology, in 1993 (He had been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley since 1963):
<b>Question: You have suggested that we should abandon the principle of extrapolating from tests on animals to human beings.</b>
We should abandon the use of rodent tests that extrapolate from huge doses in animals to tiny doses in humans. The reason to abandon them is that they are utterly worthless. They tell you absolutely nothing, When you have finished, you know you are correct within a factor of 4,000 and 4 million.
In order to derive reasonable conclusions, it is necessary to control for the enormous difference in size between humans and rodents and for the enormous difference in dose. There are several dozen models wich will do this, but without understanding the mechanism by which cancer is caused, there is no reasonable way to choose the statistical model. Therefore the choice of model vastly overdetermines the results. If you tell me you want very high results or very low ones, I am able to get what you want by choosing the model.
<b>Question: Can you elaborate on that? </b>
If, in a given field, you have a result, that result has to be filtered through a statistical mechanism. There are 70 mechanisms. Some of them give results millions of times, or hundreds of thousand of times, or ten of thousands of times larger than the others, and you have no basis for choosing among them. Therefore, the choice of model is arbitrary, which means the results are entirely arbitrary.
Nevertheless, I should caution your readers that there are many good uses of animal tests, for example to learn about mechanisms of cancer causation. But, for the specific purpose of predicting between enormously high doses in animals and very low doses in humans, <b><i>such tests are worthless. </i></b>
<b>Question: One of the goals of these tests was to establish regulations on the exposure to certain kinds of chemicals. Are these regulations necessary?</b>
No, they are not. This should be abandoned. Why such an "extreme" position?
First, everybody can see that decade by decade, people are living longer in the United States. That means that we are doing something right. It is not as if we had an epidemic of early deaths. What we want to do is to keep doing what we have been doing and use knowledge of the causes of cancer to reduce its incidence, when we know what we are doing.
Instead of this, we are taking absolutely minuscule risks and building regulations upon them. This is a much more effective method of harming capitalism than the Marxists ever discovered! From the works of Bruce Ames and Lois Gold, we know that the proportion of cancer-causing substances that come from nature is over 99.9 percent. Every plant has to defend itself against predators. <b><i>Why should we pay attention to the 0.1 percent of cancer-causing substances that are synthetic instead of the natural 99.9 percent?</i></b>
The amounts we get from synthetic chemicals, unless we drink them directly --which I certainly am not recommending-- are so tiny, so minuscule, so infinitesimal that it is not rational to be concerned about them. <b><i>This is an obsession, in contradiction to the evidence.</I></B> Another Bruce Ames's discoveries is that there is roughly 10 mg of carcinogenic material in a cup of cofee. That is greater than what I and you would get from all industrial sources as synthetic residues in food in a whole year. If you wish to be safer, if you really wish to reduce risks, <b><i>have one less cup of coffee a year.</i></b>
<b>Question: Are you accusing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Brussles Commission of harming health?</b>
Those who claim to protect people against minuscule amounts of chemicals in the name of health are not only misguided; they are not only causing more money to be spent; <b><I>they are harming health</i></b> by decreasing the standard of living, let alone making people worry when they have no reason to do so. ---
--- <b>Question: Why is it that this courage, the simple act of speaking the truth, is so rare around Brussels and Washington?</B>
The environmentalists have captured the imagination of many people. I think that a fair view would be that if you look at the presentation of harm in the major media, either in France or in the United States, <b><i>people are frightened by what they are told to be frightened about, over and over again...</i></b>
Polls show that around 40 percent of people believe these lies. This is a matter of concern. There are people, I think, who are predisposed to think <b><I>that small amounts of chemicals are bad because it is repeated to them over and over again.</i></b> Moreover, they are thought to regard saving the environment as a great altruistic gesture. But one cannot be altrustic while being stupid and ignorant.
<b>Question: You denounced the precautionary principle, adopted last year at the Earth Summit in Rio, as being directed against public health. You propose to replace it with the criterion of preponderant evidence for probable harm. </b>
Right. If you say we are going to promote health by using the so-called precautionary principle --that if something could <b><i>possibly</I></b> do harm to people, you are going to rule it out-- you are going into a blind alley.
I will give you an example: it is well known and established all over the world that most murders take place in families, among people who loved each other, or once loved each other. So my advice is that you should never love anybody, because if you do, you increase by some minuscule amount the chance of that they will murder you! This whole thing is ridiculous.
The Romans were dying in their 30s. We are dying in our 70s or even early 80s. Why? Because the Romans believed in doing the same thing over and over again, while we abandoned the precautionary principle and believe in trying new things. They believed in <b><i>possibilities </i></b>; we believe in <b><i>probabilities</b></i>.
If you say something might conceivable be harmful, it can never be ruled out. The results is that you have a tremendous number of false positives. That is to say, most of the times you will be wrong. Some will ask: "What's the matter, as long as you protect health?". The answer is that every time you are wrong, there is a huge expenditure and a great deal of fear. That expenditure reduces the standard of living and there is immense evidence that this reduction leads to lower health.
If you don't agree with this, look at the death rates in very poor countries compared to very rich ones. The whole thing is a swindle. The radicals used to criticize conservatives because the conservatives believe in incrementalism. What the environmentalists are doing is not conservative, it is reactionary. They are saying that if there is something infinitesimal that might cause harm, you should stop. That's the most reactionary doctrine in the world. And it's bad for our health.
(End of the interview).
