Obviously they can’t show that, there is no plausible biological mechanism, no increase in prostate cancers, and no evidence any of the people who got prostate cancer had contact with the pesticides at all.
That’s the great thing about epidemiology, at least if you are a trial lawyer who wants to sue farmers and agricultural companies. It needs no science, it just needs to find correlation in a spreadsheet.(1) The problem with the approach, and the reason it isn’t trusted by the public, is that if it only takes correlation, which means coin flips can be shown to be biased against heads. Or tails.(2) Meat both causes and prevents cancer. Organic food causes autism while DDT increases male fertility.
Do you believe any of that? No, nor should you, but it is correlation and that is why epidemiology is in the EXPLORATORY pile rather than the science one. Unfortunately, it is also a key reason why the public don’t trust scientists ass they once did. Corporate media don’t make the distinction. A few will try to couch that it’s only correlation in ‘While this doesn’t prove X food prevents Y disease the authors believe their work is reason to embrace the Z diet’ or, in the case of promoting chemophobia, claim more regulations are needed to prevent problems they don’t know are happening.
If you lived in one of 3,144 counties where a weedkiller was used and got prostate cancer, call your lawyer now. You don’t even need to show you were ever near one, in epidemiology, one dose is the same as 10,000 doses.
If 2,4-D could cause cancer, 75% of Americans would be dead. It has been used since the 1940s, so it predates approval of the copper sulfate that the marketing reps who run the National Organic Standards Board section inside the USDA Marketing Service – by 16 years.
The authors also claim the weedkillers trifluralin, cloransulam-methyl, and diflufenzopyr and the pesticide thiamethoxam are killing you but even the EPA only has a tepid ‘epidemiologists say this may cause cancer’ on one of them. The others are more like the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) claiming tea is hazardous to your health while eating bacon is as harmful as eating plutonium. No one else believes it except trial lawyers hoping to sue in front of a San Francisco jury.
The data are all publicly available but that shows the laziness of the approach. If you even lived in a county where one of 295 chemicals were used, and got prostate cancer, you are in their hazardous pool. Even if you never got near a farm. They are exploiting averages to try and manufacture concern. There are no “cancer alleys” in the US but some places will be higher average and if you ignore the lower ones and get a corporate journalist at Mother Jones to write about the high ones, their readers don’t know anything about science or reason and will believe you.
Nearly 500 years ago, Paracelsus formalized what even illiterate peasants knew – the dose makes the poison. Water can kill you if you drink too much, as can any remedy. IN 2024, epidemiologists don’t agree. They now believe in long-debunked homeopathic effects and that any dose is a poison.
It’s great corporate conspiracy populism but it’s not science.
NOTES:
(1) To help in its war on science, the Biden administration’s EPA declared they would use “real world data” to create regulations on pesticides, by which they meant epidemiology. It’s been a disaster and one reason scientists won’t miss the last four years. Unfortunately for scientists, at least one potential appointee in the Trump administration is as anti-science as anyone during the Clinton years, which was the high-water mark for woo-based decision-making.
(2) The reason epidemiologists like to use so many rows and columns is because with 61 rows and 10 columns even of coin flips you are guaranteed to be able to claim statistical significance. That is why I was a signatory on a paper in Nature noting that statistical significance should stop being invoked.
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