Pesticides

When my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child, our thinking about food safety seemed to shift overnight. Fears that we once disregarded suddenly morphed into potential threats we had to assess for our son's sake.

On a personal level, it’s Saturday morning.

Pick just about any newspaper or journal and during the course of a year, one or more articles will be devoted to the benefits (or not) of organic foods and the downsides (or not) of conventionally grown food with pesticides and herbicides.

Scaring old people is a time-tested strategy to scrounge up votes ("He'll take away your Medicare!") or to steal money ("Your Social Security number has been compromised. Please send payment.")

By Michael Dourson, Bernard K. Gadagbui, and Patrician M. McGinnis

How do you know when a "study" isn't really a study? When the people who performed it wrote up a brochure hyping its results before actually bothering to publish a scientific paper.

We had a really bad flu season this year. The CDC just announced that about 80,000 Americans were killed.

Some studies are so incredibly stupid, that one wonders how they managed to get published in any scientific journal, let alone a prestigious one. And yet, it has happened, once again1.

Like the word "chemical," the word "pesticide" has been hijacked and then unfairly demonized.

Two weeks ago, we reported on a bizarre decision by the online news arm of the journal Science: The outlet had reprinted an article