Two recent articles in my hometown newspaper show how hard a time the media have understanding and explaining science.
The "Organic Foods" Story
The website TomPaine.com seems to exist mainly to place large ads on the op-ed page of the New York Times, usually denouncing corporate greed in such cartoonish and oversimplified terms that one almost expects to see the pieces decorated with top hat-wearing Snidely Whiplash figures, chomping on cigars and carrying big bags of money.
That is standard left-wing politics, but TomPaine.com recently took up a new cause: attacking vaccine manufacturers.
Today's topic: natural pesticides.
At Nutrition News Focus, we were recently questioned about a statement in NNF that 99.99 percent of the pesticides we eat are natural. This has been known by scientists for many years, but some activists try to give the impression that man-made chemicals must be bad while natural ones must be good. Well, chemicals are chemicals. In fact, all of us are just big bags of chemicals held in by skin.
It's astonishing how quickly a gullible press, starting with former ABC News science reporter Michael Guillen, rushed to cover the Raelian UFO cult's recent announcement that they had overseen the live birth of a human clone. No peer review, no evidence the cult just made an announcement and the press eagerly spread the word. Not surprisingly, the press soon had to cover the embarrassing news that the cult will not be making the reported clone available for verification by independent tests.
"For practical purposes, the supply of...plaintiffs claiming workplace exposure to asbestos but no injury is essentially infinite. Asbestos litigation will go on until the last dollar is extracted from an ever-widening group of defendants."
Lester Brickman, N. Cardozo School of Law,writing in the January 6 Wall Street Journal
You can have all sorts of irresponsible fun with statistics, but James Bond video games may be more educational, as I learned over the holidays.
Executive Summary
Beef is a highly nutritious food. It is particularly valuable as a source of zinc, iron, and other minerals; B vitamins and choline; and protein. Beef also contains components that may have health benefits, such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).
Recent research from the Harvard School of Public Health and Sweden's Karolinska Institute found no link between consumption of acrylamide from foods and the occurrence of colon, bladder or kidney cancers. These results are in line with expectations of physicians and scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) (see Acrylamide in Food: Is It a Real Threat to Public Health?).
